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ATLAS recognises the accomplishments of its collaboration members

1 March, 2021

By Mariana Velho Katarina Anthony

The 2020 ATLAS Outstanding Achievement Awards ceremony was held online on 11 February 2021. Established in 2014, the awards recognise outstanding contributions in support of the ATLAS experiment, covering all areas except physics analysis.

The Collaboration Board Chair Advisory Group, which selected the winners, received a total of 61 nominations – of individuals or teams – for 32 ATLAS activities.

“The ATLAS Outstanding Achievement Awards provide a way of acknowledging the diverse efforts that keep the experiment producing high-quality data,” says Al Goshaw from Duke University (USA) and the Awards Committee Chair. This year’s awards highlighted eight activities involving a total of 21 people, recognising technical work on the detector operation, upgrade, software, computing and combined performance. Meet the winners on the collaboration website!

Also on 11 February, ATLAS celebrated its PhD students, a key cohort of the collaboration who make unique and crucial contributions to the experiment while working on their degree. Every year, their work is acknowledged through the ATLAS Thesis Awards. The theses that receive awards can cover any area of ATLAS physics, including detector development, operations, software and performance studies, and physics analysis.

“We received 41 nominations this year, which is more than in any previous year,” says Jessica Leveque from the Laboratoire d'Annecy de Physique des Particules (France) and the ATLAS 2020 Thesis Awards Committee Chair.

This year’s winners are: Christina Agapopoulou (University of Paris-Saclay), Milene Calvetti (University of Pisa), Jennet Dickinson (University of California, Berkeley), Kurt Hill (University of Colorado, Boulder), Luigi Marchese (University of Oxford), Cristiano David Sebastiani (University of Rome “La Sapienza”), Cecilia Tosciri (University of Oxford) and Marco Valente (University of Geneva).

____ Read the full articles on the ATLAS collaboration website:

• ATLAS recognises the outstanding achievements of Collaboration members
• Students step into the limelight: ATLAS awards excellent PhD theses

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ATLAS is a multi-purpose particle physics detector with a forward-backward symmetric cylindrical geometry and nearly 4π coverage in solid angle. It is one of the largest and most complex scientific instruments ever constructed, measuring about 44 meters in length and 25 meters in diameter. The detector consists of various layers, each designed to measure different properties of the particles that emerge from the LHC collisions:

• Inner Tracker : Closest to the collision point, this high-precision tracker detects the paths of charged particles.
• Calorimeters : Surrounding the tracker are the calorimeters. The Electromagnetic Calorimeter measures the energy of electrons and photons, while the Hadronic Calorimeter does the same for hadrons.
• Muon Spectrometer : Encasing the calorimeters, the muon spectrometer tracks muons, particles similar to electrons but much heavier, using a system of large superconducting magnets and precision chambers.
• Magnet Systems : The ATLAS detector utilizes a unique configuration of magnets, including the largest superconducting toroid magnets ever made, to bend the paths of charged particles for momentum measurement.

ATLAS is designed to detect a wide range of particle interactions. Its various components work together to provide comprehensive data about the particles produced in LHC collisions, including their trajectories, momenta, energy, and other identifying characteristics. This information is used for identifying and studying the properties of new and known particles, testing the predictions of the Standard Model, and searching for new physics beyond it.

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The ATLAS collaboration is proof of the effectiveness of global scientific partnership. Comprising over 3,000 scientific authors from 42 countries and 182 institutions, the success of ATLAS relies on the close collaboration of research teams located at CERN, and at member universities and laboratories worldwide.

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