An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a map of Earth or a region of Earth, but there are atlases of the other planets (and their satellites) in the Solar System. Atlases have traditionally been bound into book form, but today many atlases are in multimedia formats. In addition to presenting geographic features and political boundaries, many atlases often feature geopolitical, social, religious and economic statistics. They also have information about the map and places in it.

ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) is one of the seven particle detector experiments (ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, TOTEM, LHCb, LHCf and MoEDAL) constructed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a new particle accelerator at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. ATLAS is 44 metres long and 25 metres in diameter, weighing about 7,000 tonnes. The project is led by Fabiola Gianotti and involves roughly 2,000 scientists and engineers at 165 institutions in 35 countries. The construction was originally scheduled to be completed in June 2007, but was ready and detected its first beam events on 10 September 2008. The experiment is designed to observe phenomena that involve highly massive particles which were not observable using earlier lower-energy accelerators and might shed light on new theories of particle physics beyond the Standard Model.