The anticipation on site in Switzerland is tangible as the final steps in the construction of the ATLAS detector get underway, ahead of the LHC switch-on later this year. But whilst all the hard work is going on down in the pit, a small team of people are toiling equally hard to bring that sense of excitement and wonder out into the wider world, and throw open a window onto what will be the biggest experiment in the history of human kind.

When the Venezuelan Antonio Cárdenas discovered the program HELEN –the High Energy Physics Latin American European network – he did not doubt it a second and applied for it. For this physics student from the University of Los Andes in Venezuela, HELEN was a unique chance to come to Europe and get hands on particle physics, a field that he had only read about in books before.

Anyone working on the ATLAS experiment right now will agree that it is more than a full-time job. But Monica Dunford is not your average woman. On top of working on the Tile Calorimeter, helping to commission the Level-one Trigger, and coordinating Tile Cal’s operation running, she somehow finds the time and energy to row, ski, run marathons, and tell the world about life here at ATLAS.

Ned Spencer may be a key member of the ATLAS grounding and shielding team, but he came to physics at the relatively late age of 32. “All through my twenties I spent a lot of time at the San Francisco Zen Center,” he says. “Zen Buddhism is really a kind of yoga in which the main asana, or position, is sitting cross-legged.” That was something Ned had difficulties with. “I began to have trouble with the nerves in my legs so I couldn’t sit and meditate much. That limited what I felt I could do in the community.”

Kamal Benslama is a young professor of physics leading the ATLAS-Regina group, a recently formed and international high energy physics research team at the University of Regina in Canada. The group was set up in 2006, and all its members - Kamal, post docs, graduate and undergraduate students are devoting their efforts to the ATLAS detector. Their research operates on two fronts: the Liquid Argon calorimeter and the High Level Trigger.

Celebrations are underway in the ATLAS Experiment, as the final element of the detector was lowered into the cavern on Friday February 29th, 2008. The second “small wheel” is also the final part of the muon subsystem, but the wheels themselves are small in name only. At 9.3 metres in diameter, and weighing in at 100 tons each, moving them from their construction warehouse, at the north-west tip of the CERN site in Geneva, to the underground ATLAS cavern was a challenge which was anything but small.

We’ve all heard the story about the End Cap Toroid magnets having only a few centimetres clearance on either side as they were eased into place in the detector last year. Well, Tatiana Klioutchnikova and her colleagues are the ones to thank for that carefully controlled close-shave not ending up in a disastrous scrape.

As happens with many good things in life, Steve Goldfarb came across physics by chance: “When I went to undergraduate school, I was planning to become a medical doctor,” says Steve. The revelation moment happened when he opened an organic chemistry textbook. That was when he realized that what he had found seductive in chemistry were the rules that dictate the order of the chemical elements in the periodic table. “Behind those rules were fascinating physics equations,” he says.

It could be a scene from a James Bond movie. But this action shot of two intrepid rappellers (abseilers) was in fact taken in the ATLAS experimental cavern one night in December. François Butin, the ATLAS experimental area manager, tells the story behind the photograph.

Most ATLAS users know Emil Obreshkov only as a man at the end of a mysterious e-mail address. Ceri Perkins went along to meet the man himself, and find out a bit more about him.

When Alessandra Ciocio was given the opportunity to work on the installation of the ATLAS detector, she jumped at the chance. “I was interested in getting this detector to work,” she says.

The prospect of a life full of challenges is what brought Weina Ji to study physics at the University of Nanjing, in China. However besides the intellectual stimulation that physics provides, she also describes the field as 'useful'. "The logic that you develop while learning physics can also be applied outside this particular world if later on you don't continue in this career," she says.

Geoff Tappern, Senior Installation Project Engineer at ATLAS, retired at the end of December, over thirty years after his first visit to CERN. “I came here in 1971 from Rutherford,” he says. “We were designing part of an experiment with Alan Astbury. Back then nuclear physics was still a bit of an unknown science. Cryogenics – I couldn’t even spell the word!”

The cables within the ATLAS detector may be thought of as the blood vessels and nervous system of the experiment; they carry power to the detector, they deliver messages to control its functions and they relay the data taken, ready for analysis. Just as blood vessels and nerves criss–cross and connect the organs and tissues of the human body, cables penetrate the whole of the ATLAS volume, reaching each and every one of its elements.

Dave Charlton and his team have a mammoth job on their hands; Charlton has been tasked with coordinating the Full Dress Rehearsal (FDR) of the computing and data analysis processes of the ATLAS experiment, a run–through which he describes as "essential, almost as much as ensuring the detector itself actually works".

It is something unusual to see a woman-engineer in pink coveralls giving instructions around. But down into the ATLAS pit, this is a matter of routine. Our main protagonist is Maarit White, the Finnish engineer who among many other installation tasks has been in charge of supervising the scaffolding. She has become a sort of an icon among her co-workers, who know her as 'the pink engineer’.

"It's amazing that you have to build something so huge to measure such extremely small things," said Tom Christiansen from Telemark in Norway, after visiting the ATLAS cavern. His sentiment about the size of the ATLAS detector was shared by the thirty–one other physics teachers who, together with Tom, attended the first Norwegian Teacher Programme run at CERN, in November 2007.

The magnets on either end of the ATLAS detector (called end–cap toroid magnets) dominated November’s work in the experimental cavern. The ATLAS magnet team took a significant step towards finishing work on the ATLAS detector as testing of the magnets began.

Leading up to the lowering of the pixel detector into the ATLAS cavern, final preparations were proceeding quickly.

On 14 June, 2007, ESA/NASA astronaut Christer Fuglesang visited the ATLAS cavern. A former CERN fellow working on ATLAS, Christer went on to become the first Swedish astronaut and participated in the STS-116 Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station last December.

On 13 June 2007 the first of two giant toroid magnet end-caps was lowered into the ATLAS cavern on the A side. This complex and spectacular operation was completely successful.

Data have recently been collected with the toroidal magnetic field will provide for the first time the measurement of the cosmic ray muons' momenta in the ATLAS experiment and allow studies on trigger optimization, chamber calibration, chamber alignment and magnetic field maps. More than one million events were acquired. They are now being analyzed by enthusiastic members of the collaboration.

The ATLAS Detector safety system (DSS) has the mandate to put the detector in a safe state in case an abnormal situation arises which could be potentially dangerous for the detector. It covers the CERN alarm severity levels 1 and 2, which address serious risks for the equipment.

The ATLAS control room will become the brain of the detector operations. At the moment six of the final fifteen stations are already in place.

Following the successful combined SCT/TRT barrel test in the Spring 2006, a similar combined SCT/TRT endcap test is currently being performed in the SR1 building on the ATLAS experimental site at CERN. One quadrant of the SCT and two sectors of the TRT have been cabled up and are used in this test. The data taking and combined testing is expected to last until December 11th.