SARATOGA SPRINGS — A Saratoga Springs native has a close view of the world’s largest particle collider in Geneva, Switzerland.

Martina Hurwitz, 26, is an experimenter for ATLAS, which detects particles that fly off inside the Large Hadron Collider after atoms are hurled at each other at top speeds.

“I’m very excited to be working on this experiment,” said Hurwitz, a doctoral student in physics at the University of Chicago. “We are at the forefront of particle physics right now and will significantly affect future physics theories.”

The ATLAS particle detector will help scientists learn more about things like the origin of mass, extra dimensions of space and microscopic black holes, according to the project’s Web site, http://atlas.ch/index.html.

“The LHC will be the highest-energy collider on earth, so we will be exploring energy ranges never seen before,” Hurwitz said in an e-mail last week.

The city native graduated from Saratoga Springs High School in 1999. Her parents are Dan Hurwitz and Regina Hartmann-Hurwitz.

She has been working on ATLAS since 2003, and living abroad for the last three years.

“I actually live in France and work in Switzerland,” Hurwitz explained in her e-mail. “Geneva is right on the border, and a lot of people live in France because it’s cheaper.”

Her parents have gone to visit her and saw the LHC before it was hooked up, her mother said. “It’s a really impressive thing. You should see the tunnel down there. It’s miles long.”

Hurwitz is working on her doctorate in physics at the University of Chicago after getting her master’s degree there three years ago and her bachelor’s degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She said she expressed interest in high-energy physics when she came to the university, and one of the professors offered to take her on in his project.

Eleven people from the University of Chicago work on ATLAS full time, and the project also employs teams of scientists from 37 countries around the world. In all, 2,500 physicists work on ATLAS, its Web site said.

However, the collider has experienced significant problems that at last report has shut it down for at least two months.

On Thursday, the Associated Press reported that a transformer on the LHC failed within hours of its startup last week.

No collisions were attempted during last week’s celebration of the machine being turned on, but scientists did circle beams of protons through the collider, verifying that the particle detector worked. The European Organization for Nuclear Research reported that a 30-ton transformer that cools part of the collider broke, forcing physicists to stop using the atom smasher just a day after starting it up last week.

The organization stated that the transformer had been replaced and the circular tunnel had been cooled back down, but then announced that the damage was worse than previously thought and would have to close it down for at least two months..

Even before the problem occurred, no collisions were planned until early next month, when experimenters had planned to start the first low-energy collisions, according to the ATLAS Web site. High-energy collisions were planned for November.