After more than 10 years of construction, the 10 billion dollar Large Hadro Collider (LHC) started collision in Nov. of 2009 and will remain as the world's most powerful collider until at least 2038. LHC has been one of the most ambitious and exciting scientific projects in human history. The goal of LHC is to search for new physics beyond the current known physics frame work. Scientists' expectations for discoveries at the LHC include the Higgs particle which is responsible for the origin of mass, dark matter, extra dimensions, and many other new physics scenarios. The ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) are the flagship LHC experiments designed to search for such possible new physics. On July 4, 2012, ATLAS and CMS experiments announced the discovery of a new particle which is consistent with the Higgs boson (so-called "God" particle). This important discovery made headline news in all major news media around the world and was named by Science magazine as the 2012 "Breakthrough of the Year" and resulted in the award of the 2013 Nobel Prize for physics to Dr. Peter Higgs and Dr. Francois Englert, the two theoretial physicists who developed the Higgs theory in the 1960's.
The ATLAS collaboration consists of ~3000 physicists from ~200 institutions of 38 countries all over the world. Among them there are ~500 physicists from ~46 prestigious US universities (e.g. Harvard, Yale, MIT, Columbia, Stanford, Univ. of Chicago, UC-Berkeley, Univ. of Michigan, Univ. of Pennsylvania, Univ. of Washington, Univ. of Wisconsin, etc.) and 5 national labs (Argonne National Lab, Brookhaven National Lab, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center).