Particle physicists from the University of Birmingham, who work on the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will be the focus of an exhibition at Thinktank, Birmingham Science Museum.

The ‘Art of ATLAS is a new installation which illustrates how physicists are searching for answers about the beginnings of time in a multinational collaboration at the LHC at CERN, Geneva.

In a 27km tunnel under the Franco-Swiss border, scientists at the world’s largest and most complex experiment are monitoring particle collisions under conditions that would have existed less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang. ATLAS is the largest of the LHC detectors, and is measuring particle collisions to probe for new physical processes, such as searching for the Higgs Boson.

The experiment is a collaboration of more than 3000 people from all over the world. Together they have built a machine that has as many components as an aircraft carrier with 3000km of cable, 100 million electrical channels and that weighs more than 7 million kilograms, as much as the Eiffel Tower.

The exhibition aims to show that artists and physicists share a common goal – to make an abstract idea tangible. It is a multi-media installation which presents the physicists, engineers, and technicians involved in this epic endeavour, the experiment they’ve constructed, the artists lurking inside them, and the art in the imagery they create.

The exhibition starts on Friday 29th October and runs for three months.

For further information:
Kate Chapple, Press Officer, University of Birmingham, tel 0121 414 2772 or 07789 921164.