Project ATLAS 15 EU / 06.04.2009

Presentation

The main goals of the ATLAS programme include precise measurements of the  Standard Model (SM) parameters  but  also search for new  phenomena. The nucleus-nucleus collisions at the LHC energy will provide a useful opportunity to study the properties of strongly interacting matter at extreme energy density, including the possible phase transition to a colour  deconfined state, the quark gluon plasma. 

The discovery of Higgs boson, predicted by the SM to explain the electroweak symmetry breaking, has been used as a benchmark to establish the performance of the detector. The ATLAS experiment will search for Higgs boson predicted by SM in the full mass interval up to 1 TeV, taking into account various mechanisms for its production and decay.

Searches for Higgs bosons beyond the SM, the Higgs bosons predicted by the Minimal Supersym-metric Standard Model in the full parameter space are also among the main goals of ATLAS.

The search for new particles, superparteners of the already known particles is an important objective of the ATLAS physics programme. Supersymmetry is a very interesting theoretical concept as it offers the only presently known mechanism for incorporating gravity in the quantum theory of particle interactions, and postulates the existence of a high number of new particles, superparteners for all the  presently observed particles. Thus, there are predictions about the bosonic  superparteners of fermions - squarks and sleptons - and the fermionic superparteners of bosons . gluinos  and gauginos.

ATLAS is also searching for new quark and lepton families as well as for new heavy gauge bosons with masses much higher than the masses of  W and Z bosons.

The high energy domain, available at LHC, allows searching for signatures characterizing quark compositness, a very important and fundamental question.

New models propose the existence of extra dimensions leading to a characteristic energy scale  of quantum gravity in the TeV region. The emission of gravitons which escape into extra  dimensions  generating high missing transverse energy or Kaluza-Klein excitations   which manifest as Z-like resonances with ~ TeV separations in mass are predicted and will be searched in ATLAS.

LHC being a top factory with a production of 8 millions of top-antitop pairs in a year, even at low luminosity, will allow systematic studies of top quark properties and comparison of the SM predictions with precise measurements involving the top quark.

The high rate of B particle production at LHC  provides very good conditions for CP symmetry violation studies  and allows a complex study of B meson physics.

Objectives

Work Package 1: ATLAS Tile Calorimeter

• Monitoring of the operational parameters of Tile Calorimeter by the DCS data

• Contributions to the  Tile Calorimeter  Maintenance

• Operation of the Tile Calorimeter and online Data Quality

• Contributions to the Tile Calorimeter  Commissioning

Work Package 2: Online Software for ATLAS Data Acquisition System (DAQ)

• Improve the scalability performances for the software infrastructure of the DAQ

Work Package 3: Network monitoring optimization solutions for ATLAS TDAQ

• Research for network monitoring status visualization.

• Tridimensional visualization for real-time network performnce and monitoring

Work Package 4: GRID  activities and Computing

• The upgrade of the GRID site RO-02-NIPNE according to ATLAS requirements

• The maintenance of  the  RO-NIPNE-02 site for best performance within ATLAS

• Development and maintenance of ATLAS GRID cluster at Cluj

Work Package 5: Studies of Physical  Processes

• Phenomenological studies for precision predictions in Standard Model (SM) and its generalizations

• Background estimation for top-antitop production

• Study of high transverse momemntum top-antitop pairs production

• Study of the invariant mass spectrum of top-antitop pairs