The ATLAS Experiment: Mapping the Secrets of the Universe

A talk about the ATLAS Experiment given at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in July 2007 by Michael Barnett.

R. Michael Barnett is a Senior Physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is head of the 190-member international Particle Data Group and has written many research papers on the physics that may be found at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. These papers include topics such as the Standard Model, including studies of the nature of Quantum Chromodynamics, analyses of neutral current couplings, calculations of the production of heavy quarks, and studies of the properties of supersymmetric particles and higgs bosons.

For more than 25 years, he has devoted a substantial fraction of his time to science education. Barnett is a founder of two very successful national educational programs: the Contemporary Physics Education Project and the QuarkNet educational program. For many years he was Coordinator of the education and outreach program of the ATLAS Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (an experiment of 3000 physicists from 38 countries).

He has served as Chair of the California Section of the American Physical Society and as Vice President of the American Association of Physics Teachers’ Northern California Section. On many occasions, he has gone to Washington to talk with Members of Congress on behalf of the Physical Sciences. He has chaired the United States LHC Users Organization. For several years, he was Public Information Coordinator for the APS Division of Particles and Fields.

The QuarkNet educational program he co-founded has established major centers at 52 locations in 26 states. It is recognized as a model for integrating research and education nationally. The Contemporary Physics Education Project (CPEP) has been a national leader in producing materials that introduce high school and other students to the worlds of cosmology, particle physics, nuclear physics and plasma physics.