Rachid Mazini grew up in Casablanca, Morocco. Although he’s now a big fan of rugged terrain, he spent his youth as a “city boy” with holidays on the Atlantic shoreline. It wasn’t until he started university in Marrakech that he began to explore the mountains – the Atlas range, in fact.

If you call Jean-Baptiste Blanchard by his full first name, try it the French way and drop the ‘p’. But he generally goes by JB.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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!”

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.

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.

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.

Mountains are an enduring presence in the life of Marco Aurelio Díaz. “Wherever you are in Chile, the Andes are there, and they make an imprint in your mind that time does not erase,” he explains.

How does Borut Kersevan spend his free time? “What free time? is the answer,” he says with a wry grin. But what little he has, he likes to spend on family, travel, and good conversation.

On Friday, March 13th, British high school student Jonathan Higgs discovered the elusive Higgs boson among the simulated particle tracks in Minerva – a special form of ATLAS' event display program, Atlantis, designed for students in the International Particle Physics Masterclasses.

If you want insight into the lives of graduate students, look no further than Jorge Cham’s Piled Higher and Deeper comic series, detailing the trials and tribulations of earning a PhD. He brought his well-honed observational humour to CERN, meeting with a few graduate students and post-docs for a slice of life at the world’s largest physics experiment.

Twenty-eight-year-old Josef Kristofoletti is a traveling artist. On the site documenting the work of his group, transitantenna.com, he writes: "I am taking a survey of American mural painting in all of its forms, looking for the best pictures across the land, and painting some along the way." One of these paintings is an image of the ATLAS detector, a 13 x 7 metre mural on the side of the Redux Contemporary Art Center in South Carolina, entitled "Angel of the Higgs Boson".

In his more laid-back free time, Stanislav Němeček enjoys good detective novels and a production about a fictional Czech genius by the name of Jára Cimrman. The legends of Cimrman began in radio shows but later became plays in two parts: a lecture by a “professor” about recently uncovered work by this scientist/inventor/writer/philosopher and a scene played out by actors. The idea of Cimrman has been around since 1966, beginning as sort of a comic, literary protest to Communist rule. New episodes are performed every few years. Though a fictional genius, Cimrman is a symbol of Czech pride.

You may already know the head of the Secretariat, Connie Potter, but you may not be familiar with all of the women who help keep the ATLAS collaboration running smoothly. Sitting around a table with Petya Lilova (Bulgarian), Kate Richardson (British), Christine Demirdjian (French), and Claire Gibon (French), the team of the ATLAS Secretariat, the first question was: “What work in ATLAS falls to the Secretariat?”

Even after 40 years living between Britain and Geneva, New York is still audible in the voice of Eric Eisenhandler. He grew up in the Bronx – “the North Bronx” he quickly corrects, lest we imagine the violence and urban decay that South Bronx came to symbolize.

“I’ve always been an outdoors person,” says Chris Oram, echoing the sentiments of many an Alp- and Jura-hiking CERN physicist. It may come as a surprise that he spent years of study in central London, starting out at Bedford College, London University, which stood in one of the city’s largest parks. He studied physics there and proceeded to Queen Mary College of London for his PhD. However, he did his research in Vancouver, Canada.

Soshi Tsuno didn’t know much about particle physics until he met professor Hiroshi Takeda in his fourth year at Kobe University in 1996. At the time, ATLAS collaborators there were already developing the thin gap muon chambers (TGCs) that reside in both the large and small wheels, and Soshi joined this work.

Vato Kartvelishvili credits his presence at CERN to a man he never met. George Chikovani, the first Georgian to come to CERN, despite the Iron Curtain in the early 1960s, is an inspiration to him. “He started it all, certainly from Georgian side,” says Vato. Inventor of the streamer chamber, his legacy lives on in ATLAS itself as many subdetectors are advanced models based on his design.

Ferdinand Hahn may not be strictly ATLAS, but his work on gas systems is vital to all four experiments.

Forty million beam crossings, each containing about twenty collisions, must be processed and analysed each second with only two hundred of those selected and saved for further analysis. There are no second chances! That is the challenge of the ATLAS trigger system: forefront in the analysis of new discoveries at the LHC. Srini Rajagopalan, a physicist from Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in New York, has taken up this challenge and is one of the scientists responsible for making sure that the trigger selects events that are rich in physics.

Like many ATLAS collaborators, Troels Petersen’s current project is not his first CERN experience. He came here a decade ago as a summer student on NA48 and NA59, working on kaons and polarised photon beams.

I come from Michigan, the northern US state that looks like a mitten in the middle of the Great Lakes, and graduated from Michigan State University just last May (2007). I knew from the start that I wanted to write science and decided that professional writing and physics would be an excellent combination.