Deep inside the Large Hadron Collider, ATLAS is the world's largest particle detector.
The ATLAS experiment is the largest particle detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest atom smasher. The ATLAS experiment (short for "A Toroidal LHC Apparatus") detects the tiny subatomic particles created after beams of particles smash into each other at near light speed at the LHC, which is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Most famously, physicists at the LHC discovered the Higgs boson in 2012, thanks, in large part, to results from the ATLAS experiment. The ATLAS particle detector Beams of particles at the LHC whirl around a 17-mile-long (27 kilometers) underground ring near Geneva, before smashing into each other. The collisions create particles that fly out in all directions, and it's the task of a particle detector — a mass of high-tech equipment surrounding the collision point — to capture as much information as possible about them, according to CERN . Particles would normally travel in straight lines, but if they have a non-zero electric charge, their paths can be made to curve by applying a strong magnetic field . In the case of ATLAS, this is achieved using a series of enormously powerful, doughnut-shaped electromagnets called toroids. These toroids give ATLAS its name, according to ATLAS Open Data . The amount of curvature depends on the momentum of a particle, so it's possible to calculate this by tracking the exact trajectory of a particle. This is done by ATLAS's inner detector, which according to CERN is made up of three layers. First, just 1.3 inches (3.3 centimeters) from the central beam, is an array of almost 100 million silicon pixels, each smaller than a grain of sand, to detect charged particles as they shoot out from the collision point. Surrounding the pixel detector is a semiconductor tracker made up of millions of "micro-strips" of sensors, which provides further tracking of the emitted particles. Finally, a transition radiation tracker made of 300,000 gas-filled tubes, each…