In the last 35 years the most important discoveries at hadron colliders have been achieved at the Tevatron collider at Fermilab (right picture) in the Chicago suburbs, and at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (left picture) in Geneva. In a hadron collider two hadron beams (protons or anti-protons) travel at almost the speed of light in opposite directions in the same ring. Particle bunches collide head-on in the interaction region and produce millions of collisions per second. In the collisions hundreds of particles are produced. Among these, new and still unobserved particles may appear. They may have been predicted by the theory, or the may be totally unexpected. The detectors surround the interaction region and are designed with the purpose to detect and measure the properties of the maximum fraction of the produced particles. The CDF and D0 detectors were built and operated at the Tevatron, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, and ALICE second generation detectors, were built and are now being operated at LHC.
These detectors are real jewels among the experiments in high energy physics. They weight thousands of tons, and they use the most advanced technologies. Their task is observing the collision products, recognize and take "photographs" of the particles produced in the beams collisions and store all the information to disk for further studies. They can be seen as thousand-tons cameras. The brain of these complex detectors is electronics and the data-acquisition system. The Trigger looks at the data flowing from the detectors and has a very short time to decide if the event is interesting and should be recorded. This is a crucial task, since only a minimal fraction of the produced collision events, of the order of few tens per million, can be recorded to disk for further analysis.

The Fast TracKer (FTK) collaboration was spontaneously born inside the CDF collaboration. Several FTK members have been working together for many years on the CDF Trigger, and on the super-processor Silicon Vertex Tracker (SVT) designed to perform online track reconstruction within the CDF silicon vertex detector (SVX).
The first Tevatron proton-antiproton collisions were recorded at CDF in 1985. Since then CDF achieved several important scientifical results. On April 26, 1994 CDF announced the first evidence of top quark production. In the year 2006 CDF announced a new important discovery: Bs oscillations. The are only two among the many scientifical achievements of the CDF Collaboration. Great news in the year 2008: the "Panofsky 2009 prize", of the American Physical Society, to Aldo Menzione and Luciano Ristori, leaders of two fundamental projects for the mentioned discoveries: the silicon vertex detector, SVX, and the super-processor SVT. CDF was the product of the hard work of hundreds of scientistis, students, engineers and technicians. They worked for two construction campaigns of eight years each.

Several members of the FTK collaborators are also founders of the ATLAS collaboration. ATLAS is a second generation detector and it is much more complex and sophisticated than its progenitor CDF. However, as far as the Trigger is concerned, CDF still used more advanced ideas than ATLAS. It took several years of discussion to convince the ATLAS collaboration to install the second-generation super-processor Fast TracKer (FTK). FTK for ATLAS has been designed on the experience of its progenitor SVT at CDF. FTK is going to play a fundamental role in the expected challenging LHC running conditions in Phase I and Phase II.
The first proton-proton LHC collisions were recorded in ATLAS in the year 2009. Since then, ATLAS achieved several important scientific results. The most important one was certainly the Higgs discovery, jointly announced by ATLAS and CMS in summer 2012. The 2013 Nobel prize in physics was awarded to Peter W. Higgs and Francois Englert "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributed to our understandging of the orgin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider".
The common idea about the experimentalist is that of a person working by himself in his laboratory. High energy physics, on the other hand, requires huge and complex instruments and large collaborations are necessary to build and operate them.
Today physicists do the same work done by Galileo: they perform scientifical observations to test theoretical predictions or, maybe, discover new manifestations of nature.