Sharjah 24: The University of Sharjah (UoS) has officially announced it's joining in the ATLAS collaboration at the largest particle physics (High Energy Physics) laboratory known as the European Organization of Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva., Switzerland.

This includes 180 international academic institutions from 40 countries from different regions in the world, making it the largest experiment in particle physics globally, which will make it explore a wide range of particle physics and take advantage of the diversity of huge research opportunities offered by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), Where the University of Sharjah will lead the UAE group of three Universities officially announced in the statement of the annual meeting of the Atlas project.

This is the fruit of long preparation and negotiations under the close supervision and follow-up of His Excellency Prof. Hamid AL Naimiy, Chancellor of the University, who has provided strong support to the project since its inception.  In 2017, a delegation from the University of Sharjah led by Prof. Hamid AL Naimiy and Prof. Maamar Bettayeb and Dr. Rachik Soualah visited CERN and discussed with the CERN officials and the ATLAS collaboration management about the possibility of joining the ATLAS project. In November 2018, The Department of Applied Physics and Astronomy organized the First Sharjah International Conference on Particle Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology (FISICPAC). The conference was a great success and was attended by leading scientists from CERN and other countries.

In 2020,  the Deans of the Colleges of Sciences of UAEU, NYUAD, and UoS proposed to form a cluster that enables researchers and faculty in the three Universities to work together as one team, since this is a  significant step forward to develop the fundamental research and its applications in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region, then an agreement was formally signed by the three universities on January 2021 to work on developing the research program be implemented within the frame of the  ATLAS  collaboration, that’s why the University of Sharjah established a  team of high energy particle physicists including Prof. Amine Ahriche, and Dr. Rachik Soualah and other researchers.  

The ATLAS experiment is one of the physics leading collaborations worldwide. The ATLAS detector is located at the most powerful particle accelerator on earth: Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is a 27-kilometer particle accelerator located in a tunnel 100 meters underground CERN between the Swiss and French border. The LHC brings two opposing particle beams together nearly to the speed of light and smashes them together inside one of the four major detectors (ATLAS) to rebuild the early universe conditions, roughly when the universe age was one million billionths of a second. This area of research is called particle physics or High Energy Physics. It is described by the so-called Standard Model (SM) theory, which unifies the electromagnetic, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear forces in nature.

The LHC collisions inside the ATLAS detector give scientists a unique opportunity to study how elementary particles are created and interacting with each other and eventually test the predictions of the Standard Model (SM). The experiment was designed to perform several tasks from the search of new physics beyond what has been measured and is known so far, such as Dark Matter (DM), the origin of matter and Matter-Anti Matter asymmetry in the universe. Besides, the program is pushing the advanced technologies to new frontiers mainly in data acquisition systems, data storage and Software and Computing developments. In addition, the CERN-LHC collaborations is an excellent example of the multidisciplinary approach to develop new technologies. The World Wide Web is an excellent illustration of the CERN  innovations that revolutionized our lives.