The ATLAS Collaboration is pleased to be presenting its latest results at the Lepton Photon 2011 conference in Mumbai 22-27 August 2011.

For the last months (which feel like years…) I’ve been working, within a small group of people, on the precision measurement of the top quark pair production cross section, and if you think that sounds complicated – the German word is “Top-Quark-Paarproduktionswechselwirkungsquerschnitt”.

In particle physics, we describe the number of interesting particle collisions that we have in our data in terms of the "integrated luminosity", which is measured in units called inverse femtobarns. In the whole of 2010, the LHC delivered about 0.04 inverse femtobarns (about 3 million million collisions). Nowadays, it can deliver twice that in a single day!

The ATLAS Collaboration is pleased to be presenting its latest results at the Lepton Photon 2011 conference in Mumbai 22-27 August 2011.

I happened to run into Andrey Korytov after his eagerly awaited CMS Higgs talk. No, CMS had not yet seen the Higgs, and ATLAS could breathe a sigh of relief.

Well it's been a few days since the Higgs presentations at EPS, and I'm just recovering from the lack of sleep. It's ironic that I have a newborn daughter, and my sleep deprivation is due to work.

When I was invited to give a talk on behalf of ATLAS at this summer’s European Physical Society High Energy Physics conference (EPS), I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Most conferences I have been to are relatively intimate affairs where you have long discussions after every talk and then everybody trots down to the pub together to discuss the day’s results. EPS, though, is one of the largest particle physics conferences in the world. Or at least I reckon it is, having eyeballed the number of participants registered on the website, hailing from all sorts of fields ranging from astrophysics to ultra relativistic ions to our very own LHC proton-proton collider physics.

Many members of the ATLAS Experiment Collaboration have been at the European Physical Society's HEP 2011 conference in Grenoble, France, this week, revealing the results of 35 new and exciting physics analyses for the very first time.

The ATLAS Experiment has extended the energy frontier of searches for new particles and new processes beyond those of the Standard Model by studying collision events with so-called "dijets".

String Theory predicts a new symmetry, called "supersymmetry", that could shed light on some of today's mysteries of fundamental particles and interactions. In supersymmetry, every particle-type should have a "shadow" particle called a super-partner that (in general) has a much higher mass. The ATLAS Experiment has analyzed the first year of its LHC data and searched for evidence of these super-partners of ordinary matter.

There is usually a defining moment, or event, that leads a person to science. For 10 year old Martin Rybar, it was the moment when he found the chemistry laboratory kit from his uncle in his parents' house. Curiosity has always been the main driving force in science – and Martin was no exception.

Beneath our feet on this warm November night, we have realized the ancient dream of turning lead into gold.

There are many paths into science and one that might have played a key role for Takanori Kono could be LEGO bricks. Maybe it is the segmented approach learned from playing with those bricks that helped him later on tackle computer programming. It is easier to break down any problem into smaller chunks, seeing how it is put together as though it were made from basic building blocks.

“That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” we all remember Neil Armstrong saying while taking his first steps on the moon. As so many, Fred Luehring was glued to the television set that 21st of June, 1969, but to him this event meant much more than to most.

Another milestone has been passed in the long run of ATLAS toward new physics. On Monday August 9, 2010 ATLAS has recorded the first inverse picobarn (pb^-1) of 7 TeV collisions. The trend is good and we recently reached the 0.1 pb^-1 per day of integrated luminosity (meaning that we can now collect in ~10 days the amount of data we have collected over the last 4 months).

“In Sweden you can go out dancing in the summertime, where they play popular music but adapted for dancing,” says Stockholm native Bengt Lund-Jensen. Nine years ago, he decided to re-visit the dances of his undergrad days in pursuit of fitness, and now he spends his summers stepping out with other Scandinavians in the midnight twilight.

ATLAS is about to check one more particle off of its Standard Model (SM) checklist. Namely the top quark. This famous quark is perhaps one of the most complex of the SM particles.

“In a sense, life is never as you've foreseen it to be. This is also true for natural laws, and that's why I like to be a physicist so much,” Pascal Pralavorio says as he explains what makes discovery so interesting for him.

Pascal seems to have a trend flowing through his life: to strategise and plan, to accept the consequences of discovery, and to enjoy the ride. For him, to explore is everything. With such varied interests as physics, singing, and playing guitar, piano, and games of strategy, it is apparent that he has a love for the thinking process. Pascal enjoys what he encounters unexpectedly, and especially what stems from the toughest parts of problematic situations.

Going into his new position with Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand ('Wits' for short), Trevor Vickey sees his brief as “a sort of linear combination between a professorship and a Peace Corps assignment”. The tenure-track Senior Lecturer post will take him to a brand new continent, but, he says, he made the original application “on a whim” after five years as an ATLAS postdoc.

Do you hear that? The incessant typing? The coffee machines vending cup after cup? If you go to Building 40, or Building 32, Building 188, or to any one of the many graduate student offices around the world, you will hear the tap of key boards, the whir of disk drives, and even the occasional heated civil discussions with "elevated" voices.

When the detector is running smoothly, neighbors in the ATLAS control room sometimes get conversational. A few days back I was on shift, quietly looking at plots on the monitor in front of me, trying to decide if one small sensor was misbehaving or not. “I have a question,” the shifter next to me said.

In the evening of Saturday May 15, we have reached a new peak luminosity record of 6 10²⁸ cm^-2s^-1

It took a little bit of time, but the wait was worth it. The LHC has successfully achieved its first physics run with "squeezed beams"!

ATLAS has been designed to detect rare events in high energy proton-proton collisions. ATLAS ultimate goal is to measure events as rare as one in several thousand billions, but we are modest (for the time being) waiting for the luminosity to rise.

Rachid Mazini grew up in Casablanca, Morocco. Although he’s now a big fan of rugged terrain, he spent his youth as a “city boy” with holidays on the Atlantic shoreline. It wasn’t until he started university in Marrakech that he began to explore the mountains – the Atlas range, in fact.