Atlas Project - How it Works.

ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) is one of the six particle detector experiments currently being constructed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a new particle accelerator at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. When completed, ATLAS will be 46 metres long and 25 metres in diameter, and will weigh about 7,000 tonnes. The project involves roughly 2,000 scientists and engineers at 165 institutions in 35 countries.

The construction was scheduled to be completed in June 2007, however is now stated to be April or mid-2008

The experiment is designed to observe phenomena that involve highly massive particles which were not observable using earlier lower-energy accelerators and might shed light on new theories of particle physics beyond the Standard Model.