ATLAS particle detector gets its picture painted

Photonics.com : American artist Josef Kristofoletti has created a three-story-tall mural of the ATLAS particle detector at CERN ‘s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The mural, which is one-third the size of the actual detector, is located aboveground at the ATLAS experiment site, while ATLAS itself is in a cavern 100 meters below. The artist was inspired to produce the large work when he visited the detector; he was invited there by ATLAS collaboration members who had seen his smaller painting of it. “We were thrilled to learn that ATLAS and particle physics had found their way into popular art,” said Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory physicist Michael Barnett, an ATLAS outreach coordinator. Because CERN and the LHC have attracted considerable interest from the artistic community over the years, the laboratory is developing an artist-in-residence program.