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.

After almost 15 years of R&D and prototyping, the ATLAS pixel detector is finally almost ready for installation in ATLAS, and its first rendez-vous with colliding beams!

After a few weeks of testing up to intermediate currents, finally, on Thursday evening November 9, the current in the Barrel Toroid was pushed up to its nominal value of 20500 A and even 500 A beyond this value to prove that we have some margin. It went surprisingly well.

The electromagnetic barrel calorimeter was installed in its final position in October 2005. Since then, the calorimeter is being equipped with front-end electronics. Starting in April 2006, electronics calibration runs are taken a few times per week to debug the electronics and to study the performance in the pit (stability, noise). Today, 10 out of the 32 Front End crates are being read out, amounting to about 35000 channels.

The level-1 calorimeter trigger (L1Calo) has recently passed a number of major hurdles. The various electronic modules that make up the trigger are either in full production or are about to be, and preparations in the ATLAS pit are well advanced.

On 6th August ATLAS reached a major milestone for its Distributed Data Management project - copying its first PetaByte (1015 Bytes) of data out from CERN to computing centers around the world. This achievement is part of the so-called 'Tier-0 exercise' running since 19th June, where simulated fake data is used to exercise the expected data flow within the CERN computing centre and out over the Grid to the Tier-1 computing centers as would happen during the real data taking.

Wednesday 23rd August was a memorable day for the Inner Detector community as they witnessed the transport and installation of the central part of the inner detector (ID-barrel) into the ATLAS detector.

A new phase for the ATLAS collaboration started with the first operation of a completed sub-system: the central solenoid. It was cooled down from the 17th to 23th May 2006, and the first kA was put into it the same evening as it was cold and superconductive. That makes our solenoid the very first cold and superconducting magnet to be operated in the LHC underground areas.

The ATLAS solenoid coil is about 5.3m long, has a diameter of 2.5m and is designed to deliver a magnetic field of approximately 2T for the ATLAS inner detector. The superconducting solenoid coil has been integrated inside the LAr barrel cryostat and was installed at its final position inside the cavern in November 2005. This summer - after completion of the extended barrel calorimeters and before the installation of the inner detector - the end cap calorimeters (LAr end caps and Tile extended barrels) were moved for the first time into their final position in order to create conditions as close as possible to final for the solenoid tests and for mapping the field inside the solenoid bore.