The ATLAS Experiment at the CERN LHC

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The CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has the highest direct energy reach of any particle physics facility, and Canada's central role in the ATLAS collaboration at the LHC will keep us at the forefront of international particle physics. ATLAS and the LHC conducted our first major operational period, called Run 1, in 2011 and 2012, with proton-proton collision centre-of-mass energies of 7-8 TeV. With those data, ATLAS, together with the CMS collaboration, discovered the Higgs boson whose existence was predicted in 1964 and intensely sought over the intervening half century. The Higgs discovery was covered widely by International and Canadian media and led directly to the award of the 2013 Nobel prize in physics to Peter Higgs and Francois Englert. Studies of the properties of the newly observed Higgs particle have so far shown it to be consistent with the Standard Model Higgs, but the limited number of Higgs particles observed at the LHC restrict the sensitivity of the results. Canadians played leading roles in several of the analyses used to discover the Higgs boson and to measure its properties, including the current coordination of the ATLAS Higgs working group. The Higgs boson discovery was a remarkable achievement, but only scratches the surface of the potential physics reach of ATLAS and the LHC, which were designed from the outset to probe for signatures of new physics at the TeV scale that could "stabilize" the vacuum and address deficiencies of the Standard Model. Achieving the full potential of ATLAS requires more data at higher energies.