Yann Coadou may have begun his CERN fellowship just last year, but he is no stranger to the ATLAS project – it is the third time in his short career that he has worked on ATLAS.

CERN holds a special place in the hearts of Christian Schmitt and Lucia Masetti. Not only are they both working on the ATLAS project, but also the recently wedded couple first met each other on the summer student programme at CERN in 1999.

They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but how would recent attempts in a Hawaiian court to stop the opening of the LHC because of safety concerns affect the general public’s perception of CERN? The Open Day on 5-6 April gave the ATLAS Collaboration a chance to find out.

All members of the ATLAS collaboration have been working to a demanding schedule over the last few years as they prepare for the LHC turn-on, but few can claim to have been as busy as Kirill Egorov, affiliated with Indiana University. In the five years since he arrived at ATLAS from the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute in Russia, Kirill has worked on the TRT Barrel, cabling, the connection of the TRT end-cap, the gas and cooling system, and the SCT. His next task is helping with the cooling system for the pixel detector.

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.”

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.

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.

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 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.