An 18 minute video entitled The ATLAS Experiment has been declared overall winner of the 2000 MIF-Sciences Scientific Film Box Office contest.
The award-winning film explains how more than 1800 physicists from 35 countries are working on the ATLAS detector for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. It gives a glimpse behind the scenes of building a technological edifice that measures 45 m long and 22 m high, and is made up of millions of components with a precision of one-hundredth of a millimetre.
Will all of the physicists who teamed up to construct this apparatus eventually be able to answer such fundamental questions as: Where does mass come from? Why does the universe have so little antimatter? Is there an underlying theory?
Members of the ATLAS experiment’s Education/Outreach Committee developed the concept of a film for both the general public and students that would describe the physics motivations, the process by which 1800 people from all over the world go about building such a complex detector, and the accelerator that would both deliver and collide beams of protons.
Committee members prepared a detailed outline for the film and hired a professional director from the Netherlands. At various stages the participating members and ATLAS management evaluated progress and provided input. Funding came from nine countries: the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US.
The film, which combines live footage and animation, was designed to be translated into many languages, so there are two sound tracks – one with ambient sounds and the other for the narration (provided by each country). The various language versions will be linked from the ATLAS site in the near future and eventually collected onto a DVD. The film is currently available as a videotape, as a CD-ROM and on the Web.
Further reading
The Scientific Film Box Office Award is organized by MIF-Sciences (see http://www.mif-sciences.net/).
