Visit to ATLAS underground cavern

One of the privileges of working at CERN is the opportunity to see the particle experiments up close.

On Wednesday, Feb 5th, a group of CERN theorists was given a private underground tour of ATLAS detector. The above the ground building has a very colourful picture of the detector, which is actually done at the smaller scale than the real thing. However hundred meters below the ground it is hard to grasp the dimensions of this huge particle detector and my smartphone camera really does not do justice. I was fascinated to be reminded again, that detectors like ATLAS can track microscopic particles over distances of meters with micrometer precision.