ATLAS is one of the four big experiments at CERN that exploits the full potential of discovery provided by the large hadron collider - LHC. The LIP Portuguese group signed the Letter of Intent of ATLAS and had a significant role in the design, construction, start-up of operations, trigger and data acquisition systems. The main contributions were to the hadronic calorimeter TileCal, to the forward detectors, and to the software development for jet trigger signatures. The group is contributing to detector performance studies and physics data analyses since the very first data provided by the LHC. In parallel, the group is strongly involved in the ATLAS upgrade efforts in view of operating during the High-Luminosity LHC phase, developing work mostly in TileCal, Trigger and the High Granularity Timing Detector (HGTD).

The ATLAS Portuguese group contributed to the discovery of the Higgs boson and is currently studying its properties. The group is a reference in the studies of the top quark and exploits this expertise in the search for physics beyond the standard model. It is also leader in exotics states studies. Last but not the least, the group is involved in the Heavy Ion program of the LHC, contributing to the study of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), the state of matter that has occurred just after the Big Bang.

Group webpage at LIP