A delegation led by Shandong University President Li Shucai visited the A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS (ATLAS) collaboration team at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland on June 13. The delegation talked with Andreas Hoecker, the spokesperson and leader of the ATLAS collaboration, and Professor Li Haifeng, head of the Shandong University ATLAS team.

During the discussion, Professor Hoecker provided a detailed introduction to the ATLAS collaboration, outlining its basic structure, the physics goals of the ATLAS experiment, the design of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the ATLAS detector, the principles of particle detection, and the current measurements of the Higgs boson.

He also praised the Shandong University ATLAS team's significant contributions to the development of the muon detector and the analysis of Higgs physics, expressing his hope that the team would play a greater role in the detector's operation, the upgrade of high-granularity timing detectors, and data analysis.

Li Shucai expressed his gratitude to the ATLAS collaboration team for their years of support for the Shandong University ATLAS team. He noted that CERN is the world's most important platform for high-energy particle physics experiments. Shandong University will further advance organized scientific research and continue to support faculty and students in actively participating in international scientific cooperation, he said.

Li and his delegation also visited the ATLAS detector located 80 meters underground, where they learned about the technical details of the experiment's operations, including detector functionality, data acquisition, and maintenance. Li congratulated the Shandong University ATLAS team on their active contributions to international collaborative experiments and expressed hope that the team would continue to leverage their strengths, strive for new scientific achievements, and continually enhance the contributions and influence of the Shandong University ATLAS team in international collaborations.

The ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) experiment is one of the four major international collaborative experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The ATLAS detector stands 25 meters high, is 44 meters long, and weighs approximately 7,000 tons, with about 100 million electronic readout channels, making it the largest collider detector in the world. The ATLAS collaboration comprises about 3,000 scientists and engineers from 150 academic institutions across 34 countries.

Shandong University became a member of the ATLAS collaboration in 1998. Professor He Mao from Shandong University led a team that tirelessly developed 400 muon detectors between 1998 and 2008. These detectors operated reliably and achieved outstanding performance, directly contributing valuable data to the discovery of the Higgs boson. The team's efforts have received high praise from the ATLAS collaboration.

Li Shucai and his delegation visit the ATLAS detector at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland on June 13. [Photo/Shandong University]

A delegation led by Shandong University President Li Shucai talks with members of the ATLAS collaboration team at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland on June 13. [Photo/Shandong University]