Teaching Buyout to coordinate the ATLAS online operations activities

The ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider is nowadays well known to the general
public thanks to the recent discoveries and the attribution of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics which
was made possible by the discoveries of our experiment. It is expected that ATLAS will keep
exploring the realm of particle physics, and will deliver new insight in the oncoming years.
This will be possible only if the experiment is able to take data and perform up to expectations.
Dr. Cerri has been elected by the ATLAS collaboration as coordinator of the data collection
activities of the experiment. This is a major responsibility which has a critical high profile
impact on the quality and amount of data collected, and therefore on the physics potential
of the experiment. The charge of ATLAS run coordinator is hierarchically directly below the
ATLAS Management, and automatically implies the membership to the ATLAS Collaboration
Board (the policy and decision making body of the experiment) and the ATLAS Executive Board
(directing the execution of the ATLAS project). These responsibilities represent not only a
major recognition of Dr. Cerri's coordination and operational skills, but also a major opportunity for
the UK particle physics community to be represented on the international HEP scenario.

The ATLAS experiment at the LHC is currently undergoing an upgrade phase which will be concluded by the return in operation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), planned for march 2015. The LHC upgrade will deliver proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, a value never reached so far. New physics could be discovered, and higher precision measurements of the properties of the Standard Model will be possible with the data collected. However this depends critically on the detector performance, the data quality and collection efficiency, and the coordination with the other experiments and the accelerator operations. All these rely on the continuous operation of the ATLAS detector, which happens under the supervision and responsibility of the ATLAS Run Coordinator.
The experiment start-up will be a critical phase, where all the upgraded sub-detectors will come back together after having been commissioned with cosmic rays, a new TDAQ configuration of the experiment will be put in operation, and the accelerator will be gradually ramping up to the Run II luminosities and centre of mass energies.
The general public has learned a lot about ATLAS and the discoveries it made possible in recent years, and definitely expects the experiment to keep performing and delivering novel insight into particle physics.

The primary beneficiary of the support to my role as Run Coordinator will be the general public, through the impact of new discoveries that will be made possible thanks to a smooth and efficient operation of the ATLAS detector: this will in fact maximize the chances of new discoveries and the ability of the experiment to explore new landscapes of particle physics.

The ATLAS detector is built and upgraded using forefront technologies: their use and exploitation means also supporting and encouraging spin-off developments that can be of interest and impact on society. These range from computing and networking infrastructures (e.g. the world wide web) to the development of novel medical diagnostic systems (e.g. the development of detectors for radiographic applications, which are parasitically tested also during the operation of the ATLAS detector).