Friday was the last occasion for Moriond participants to see new results on specific physics topics since Saturday is reserved for summary talks. The topic was 'Beyond the Standard Model' -- a very large subject, which covers an incredible number of theoretical models, from Supersymmetry to Two-Higgs-Doublet Models, two of the most discussed topics of the day.

The winter conference season is well under way, and what better way to fill my first blog post than with a report from one of the premier conferences in particle and astroparticle physics: the Rencontres de Moriond.

Having explored the latest results on what we call 'heavy flavour' or physics of particles containing a b-quark (see The Penguin Domination by Jessica Levêque), we embarked on a much lighter subject: neutrinos.

The past two days of the Recontres de Moriond 2014 Electroweak conference have been very intense with many new experimental results, many insightful theoretical talks and many lively discussions. Since the topics cover neutrino experiments, astrophysical observations and Standard Model precision measurements, giving a summary is not an easy task. But I will try.

This week features the 2014 Moriond Electroweak conference at La Thuile, Italy. More than a 100 particle physicists gather from all around the world. Started 50 years ago, this conference is still very valued, year after year, due to the high quality of the talks. The Moriond winter conference is one of the most exciting conferences, as all the particle physics experiments present their brand new results, but it is also appealing because of the mountains and the great Italian food.

The ATLAS Thesis Awards recognize some of our postdoctoral colleagues who have made exceptional contributions to the experiment, across all areas, in the context of a PhD thesis.

The first recipients of the ATLAS PhD Grant were presented with a certificate on 11 February at CERN by the programme’s selection committee. The three scholars, Lailin Xu of China, Josefina Alconada of Argentina, and Gagik Vardanyan of Armenia, were delighted at being able to continue their PhD programmes at CERN.

In the first run of the Large Hadron Collider, almost a billion proton-proton collisions took place every second in the centre of the ATLAS detector. That amounts to enough data to fill 100,000 CDs each second. If you stacked the CDs on top of each other, in a year it would reach the moon four times. Only a small fraction of the observed proton–proton collisions have interesting characteristics that might lead to discoveries. How does ATLAS deal with this mountain of data?

The ATLAS experiment released preliminary results on 26 Nov 2013 that show evidence, with a significance of 4.1 standard deviations that the Higgs boson decays to two taus, which are fermions. This is exciting news. But what makes this measurement important?

Hold out your hand and in one minute hundreds of muons will have passed through your palm. Muons are one of the high-energy cosmic ray particles that can pass through most solid structures – even the ATLAS detector’s calorimeter, which is designed to absorb particles and measure their energy. A specific system is required to measure muons. Until now, the ATLAS muon system was almost completed, but not quite. The last of the 62 chambers in the Extended Endcap (EE) region was installed just before summer this year.

On 8 October, the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Professors François Englert and Peter Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin 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".

I've been lucky to get to make two workshop / conference stops on a trip that started at the very beginning of October. The first was at Kinematic Variables for New Physics, hosted at Caltech. Now I'm up at the Computing in High Energy Physics conference in Amsterdam. Going to conferences and workshops is a big part of what we do, in order to explain our work to others and share what great things we're doing, in order to hear the latest on other people's work, and - and this one is important - in order to get to talk with colleagues about what we should do next.

Supersymmetry (SUSY) is one of the most loved, and most hated, theories around that works as an extension of our beloved Standard Model.

More than 70,000 people visited CERN Open Days over the weekend, with 20,000 going underground to see the LHC tunnel and the detectors. Of these, an estimated 5,000 people visited the ATLAS exhibits aboveground, and another 2,500 had the opportunity to see the ATLAS detector.

Only a few more days to go before CERN opens its doors and our universe becomes yours on 28 and 29 September. With 35 surface sites and seven underground visits available, there will be plenty of activities for visitors of all ages.

Pernilla Craig earned her licence to fly last year aged just 17, making her one of UK’s youngest female pilots. A visit to CERN last week took her deep underground to see dectectors on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and into the sky above the Alps for a bird's eye view of the laboratory.

There's a (potentially) really big deal in physics that's just ended: the Snowmass conference. Ken over at the USLHC blog has already mentioned it, and I've been watching with interest from here in Geneva as well. The meeting, and its reports, are trying to walk an extrodinarily delicate line that's interesting for both the physics and the sociology involved.

After a long hiatus from US ATLAS, I recently started a new job at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. It's one of the few remaining labs in the US funded by the Department of Energy that does basic science research. It's the fourth job I've had in four years, all working on ATLAS, and all working on similar projects. This one is different, though: if I pass a performance review a few years from now, I'll have the lab-equivalent of tenure. I've had reactions ranging from "who did you have to kill to get that job" to "so who did you actually talk to to land that"?

ATLAS today presented new searches for Supersymmetry, a theory that could explain the large amount of dark matter in the universe.

At the EPS HEP conference today, ATLAS released a new precise measurement of the top quark mass using events where both top quarks decay via W bosons to electrons or muons. ATLAS also presented limits on the possibility of the top quark decaying to channels not foreseen in the Standard Model. A comparison of the behaviour of top quarks and anti-top quarks produced at the LHC is in agreement with the prediction of the Standard Model, disfavouring models of new physics that require a large top/anti-top asymmetry.

ATLAS physicists will be presenting new results at the biennial Europhysics conference on High Energy Physics this year. The conference, which will take place 18 to 24 July in Stockholm, Sweden, is organized by the High Energy and Particle Physics Division of the European Physical Society (EPS).

Callum Kerr, 17, visited the ATLAS cavern on 8 July, with this family and a representative from Make-A-Wish Foundation.

In June 1993, ATLAS and CMS were given the provisional go-ahead to submit technical proposals. Twenty years later, for the discovery of the Higgs boson, the European Physical Society has awarded the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize 2013 to the research teams of the ATLAS and CMS experiments. For their “pioneering and outstanding leadership roles in the making” of the experiments, the prize also goes to ATLAS' Peter Jenni and CMS' Michel Della Negra and Tejinder Virdee. We talked to Peter Jenni, who was spokesperson of the ATLAS collaboration for the first 15 years, on ATLAS' past and future.

A small scale version of the ATLAS detector can be made available as an official LEGO® product, but I need people to vote for it at LEGO Cuusoo. We need 10,000 votes to be considered by LEGO®.

The series of workshops named "Deep Inelastic Scattering (DIS)" started way back in Durham, UK in 1993. In the last twenty years, particle physics has evolved in many ways, and this years DIS held at Marseille between April 22-26th was a testament to that fact. While it was one of the biggest conference in terms of Standard Model physics talks from ATLAS, it included talks and latest results covering the full ATLAS (and other big LHC experiments) physics program.