Beyond the top; a new era in particle physics

We are about to enter a fascinating new era in particle physics with the start of CERNs Large Hadron Collider. Protons will collide with unprecedented high energy and intensity, recreating conditions equivalent to those just after the Big Bang. Never before were the expectations so high for finding new fundamental forms of matter. Observation of these will have far reaching implications of our understanding of Nature?s building blocks at the most elementary level. Discovery of new heavy particles may shed light on the origin of dark mass in our Universe, and radically change our view of it. The construction of the Atlas experiment, designed to observe millions of proton collisions each second, is almost completed and Atlas is ready for recording the first events. After a commissioning phase we are ready to harvest data that may reveal exciting new phenomena. I believe the search for new forms of matter will be best achieved by a detailed study of the well-known signal originating from top-quarks. The top-quark is the heaviest known elementary particle and it leaves a complex but unique signature in the detector, and so it will play an important role during the commissioning phase. Next, the study of top-quarks can reveal the existence of new heavy particles that decay into top-quarks, as postulated by various speculative models. Finally, the top-quark signal is very similar to that of many new particles with higher mass, and prompt understanding of all top-quark aspects is indispensable in searches for these new forms of matter. I propose to build and coordinate an efficient team of researchers dedicated to the analysis of top-quarks with the Atlas data. The ultimate goal of the group will be the discovery of new phenomena and hopefully the nature of dark matter. With the approval of this proposal the Netherlands would be at the forefront of this exciting new era in particle physics.