Located at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, ATLAS is currently under construction and is scheduled to start taking data at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Summer 2009. The LHC will collide proton beams with an energy of 14 TeV and will open up a totally new energy frontier. This leap into uncharted territory will allow us to tackle many important questions including some of Nature's most puzzling mysteries: the origin of mass, the nature of dark matter, the unification of fundamental interactions, the search for extra dimensions, and more.

The UMass ATLAS group is heavily involved in software development for the Muon Spectrometer. We are leading several areas: event data model, reconstruction, and data quality. Physics interests lie in searches for physics beyond the Standard Model with muon and missing energy signatures. We are particularly interested in understanding the impact and improving the performance of muon reconstruction at high energies. Initial work will focus on commissioning the detector, as well as testing and improving the performance of the reconstruction algorithms for physics analysis.