Many questions in particle physics are related to the existence of particle mass. The “Higgs mechanism,” which consists of the Higgs field and its corresponding Higgs boson, is said to give mass to elementary particles.

The fifth annual Large Hadron Collider Physics (LHCP2017) conference was held this week at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in a leafy suburb in the former French concession in Shanghai, China. This year there were more participants than ever before: 470 people from universities across the globe. ATLAS presented an interesting set of new results exploiting the high statistics of the combined 2015 and 2016 dataset.

I’m writing from the annual Hadron Collider Physics Symposium, which began on Monday in Paris, France. It’s organised jointly by LPNHE and the University of Paris VI & VII, with an excellent location right in the heart of the Latin Quarter. HCP is a fun conference with only plenary talks, which means that I’ve had the chance to attend talks on a wide range of subjects including many quite remote from my usual areas of expertise.

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

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