For Rolf Seuster, there’s no place like Victoria, Canada. Located on Vancouver Island, about 90 km south of this year’s Winter Olympics, Rolf believes it’s one of the nicest places in the country. “It’s the size of Switzerland, and there’s maybe half a million people on the whole island,” he says.

It’s hardly a stretch of the imagination to think of ATLAS and CMS as siblings: competing, trying to get ahead, but ultimately friendly and supportive of each other. But for Germán Carrillo, the analogy moves over into the literal, because while he studies for a PhD on ATLAS, older brother Camillo is a six-year CMS devotee.

Today ATLAS has started the integrated runs. This has happened before, nevertheless this is the first time ATLAS subdetectors get together after the winter break, a lot of work has been done since then.

When the time came for François Butin to do his military service for France, he wasn’t interested in the armed forces. Instead, he chose to become a “cooperant”, working for a longer period in research or engineering. “In the old days, if you wanted to do your military service in an intelligent way, that was one of the good opportunities,” says François.

Attila Krasznahorkay has physics in his blood, the son of a nuclear physicist and a physics and math teacher. He was also introduced to the traveling life style at an early age, moving from his Hungarian homeland to Groningen in the Netherlands at eight years old when his father began work in the city’s university. His young, agile brain managed to pick up the Dutch language, but now, although he recalls the experience of being fluent at age nine, he struggles to think of words.

High Energy Physicists have been waiting for many years to see the LHC turn on. Now that it has been turned on, the network of physicists around the world have quickly been harnessed. It can be considered a phase transition in particle physics.

Thorsten Wengler can still remember exactly where he was when the Berlin wall fell in November 1989: on night guard, sitting atop a pile of arms and ammunition in the woods outside of Potsdam, Germany, alongside three of his fellow East German soldiers.

This early morning Dec.14 at 2.40, after a 8 minutes ramp, the energy of the two LHC beams has been brought up to 1.18 TeV again.

At 21:32 pm on December 8th, the LHC did something that no other accelerator has ever done before.

On Sunday December 6, 2009 at 8.00 the ATLAS Pixel Detector has measured, for the first time, tracks emerging from LHC collisions. It has been a very smooth start.

It's been a busy weekend for ATLAS. Last night, well, actually early this morning, we received the "stable beam" flag from the LHC.

If a chance meeting hadn’t led Tapas Sarangi to a PhD in Japan, things could have been very different: “I would probably have been in the Indian Navy as a commissioned officer!” he admits.

A few days ago, loud cheers and happy faces filled the ATLAS Control Room while the whole detector lit up: protons are back at the experiment's door, and everybody forgot in a second the long year of waiting for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to resume operation.

Loud cheers and happy faces fill the ATLAS Control Room while the whole detector lights up: protons are back today at the experiment's door, and everybody forgets in a second the long year of waiting for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to resume operation.

Yongsheng Gao was born in Jinan, the capital of the Shandong province of China, also the home of Confucius some 2500 years ago. The Yellow River flows by Jinan, the ‘City of the Springs’, with the Mountain Tai nearby.

The most recent schedule envisions beam reaching ATLAS in late November with low-energy collisions shortly thereafter.

Unlike most of us at CERN, Hans Peter Beck is a Swiss native. He grew up in places like Weggis, on the shore of Lake Lucerne; Wolfenschiessen, in the mountainous interior of Switzerland; Dietikon, a suburb of Zürich, and finally in Zürich itself. He completed his matura – the Swiss secondary education – at the Mathematical Natural Science Gymnasium, Rämibühl, Zürich. Although he received better marks in chemistry at the time, physics held a much stronger attraction because it delves into matter at its most basic.

Looking back, as he can now, from a position of maturity, Nabil Ghodbane is a little embarrassed about the scene that unfolded when he met Peter Higgs. “At the time, I was maybe a bit naïve,” he admits bashfully, as he recounts a tale of waiting outside the toilets after a Scottish summer school talk to greet Professor Higgs on his way out. “We were like groupies!” he laughs at himself and other students who stampeded the reluctant physics celebrity.

“The first time I came to Munich, I fell in love with the city,” says Sandra Horvat. She was born in Zagreb, Croatia, and her parents and brother still live 20 kilometres from the city, in Samobor. “It's a lovely and cosy place, one of the oldest and favourite recreation places for many Croats. I like it a lot!”

As an ATLAS physicist, it’s not often you get to stand back and look at the bigger picture, according to Richard Teuscher: “Not at all! It’s only really when you get a chance to talk to someone about what you’re doing. Day-to-day, you’re writing software or fixing some part of the detector. But at the end you think, ‘Wow, look what we’ve done!’"

Moscow has been home to Lidia Smirnova for as long as she can remember. She was born in Ukraine, her mother’s region, shortly after the end of World War II. Her father, from Siberia, had served five years in the thick of the fighting, on the Soviet side. “He was wounded twice, but was really lucky to be saved with his life,” says Lidia. He was also very lucky to be stopped in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, on his way from Germany to Japan. In that summer, 1945, he met Lidia’s mother.

Most people at CERN know Claudia Marcelloni as the ATLAS photographer and the exquisite eye behind the ATLAS book, Exploring the Mystery of Matter. But to Claudia, photography is just one tool that she could use to practice her passion: the creative communication of ideas.

Born Jorge in Argentina, George Mikenberg is a man of many aliases. He changed his name to the Hebrew Giora when he settled in Israel, but in English-speaking company, he encountered a problem: “The Anglo-Saxons cannot pronounce it, or rather they pronounce it in a way that means WC in Arabic.” And so he became George, but also Georg for the German-speaking, and Georges for his French-Swiss wife.

For Jochen Schieck, monthly trips to CERN – often spanning just one day – suit him well. The rest of the time he’s based at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) of Physics in Munich.

Particle physics is an endurance sport. The building of ATLAS took nearly two decades of design and construction. In the early autumn, the blast from the first colliding particles will mark the start of a multi-year race to discover new physics. This rhythm of preparation and performance is one that Adele Rimoldi knows well.