Challenges of the ATLAS Experiment at the LHC

Several hints suggest that we are on the right track towards unification of the fundamental forces: the strong and electroweak coupling constants converge at energy scales of 10**16 GeV, if corrections due to Supersymmetry are included. "Dark matter", material completely unlike ourselves, yet making up 25% of the universe, may well be explained by a stable neutralino.

At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, starting in 2007, we will probe new physics such as SUSY in proton-proton collisions at 14 TeV, extending our reach by an order-of-magnitude over previous colliders. This talk will describe the wealth of physics to be discovered at the LHC, the challenges in building and commissioning the ATLAS detector, and the outlook for the future.