Courtesy of CERN
01/14/21
By Stephanie Melchor
The ATLAS collaboration has begun to publish likelihood functions, information that will allow researchers to better understand and use their experiment’s data in future analyses.
Meyrin, Switzerland, sits serenely near the Swiss-French border, surrounded by green fields and the beautiful Rhône river. But a hundred meters beneath the surface, protons traveling at nearly the speed of light collide and create spectacular displays of subatomic fireworks inside the experimental detectors of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory.
One detector, called ATLAS, is five stories tall and has the largest volume of any particle detector in the world. It captures the trajectory of particles from collisions that happen a billion times a second and measures their energy and momentum. Those collisions produce incredible amounts of data for researchers to scour, searching for evidence of new physics. For deca