ATLAS Results from the first Pb-Pb Collisions

TL;DR

The ATLAS experiment successfully demonstrated its capability to analyze high-energy Pb-Pb collisions, confirming detector performance at high multiplicities and enabling heavy-ion physics research at the LHC.

Contribution

This paper reports the first results from ATLAS on Pb-Pb collisions, validating detector performance for high multiplicity events and expanding the collider's physics program.

Findings

Confirmed ATLAS detector performance at high multiplicities

Demonstrated capability to analyze Pb-Pb collision data

Supported physics studies with heavy-ion beams at the LHC

Abstract

The ATLAS detector is capable of resolving the highest energy pp collisions at luminosities sufficient to yield 10's of simultaneous interactions within a bunch collision lasting <0.5 nsec. Already in 2011 a mean occupancy of 20 is often found in pp running. In 2004 studies by ATLAS showed that the detector would have excellent performance also for the foreseeable particle multiplicities in the highest energy p-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions that the LHC will produce. These studies resulted in a letter of intent to the LHC committee by ATLAS to do physics with these beams also. In the past 2 years of data taking, ATLAS detector performance studies have confirmed these expectations at the actual multiplicities presented below. The ATLAS program removes an artificial specialization that arose about 30 years ago in high energy physics when the energy and intensity frontier moved to colliders. Before that time, for example, the same experiment that discovered the $\Upsilon$ (CFS and E605 at Fermilab) also measured the nuclear modification factor in the production of high $p_T$ identified charged hadrons using nuclear targets from Beryllium through Tungsten.