ATLAS is about to check one more particle off of its Standard Model (SM) checklist. Namely the top quark. This famous quark is perhaps one of the most complex of the SM particles.

“In a sense, life is never as you've foreseen it to be. This is also true for natural laws, and that's why I like to be a physicist so much,” Pascal Pralavorio says as he explains what makes discovery so interesting for him.

Going into his new position with Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand ('Wits' for short), Trevor Vickey sees his brief as “a sort of linear combination between a professorship and a Peace Corps assignment”. The tenure-track Senior Lecturer post will take him to a brand new continent, but, he says, he made the original application “on a whim” after five years as an ATLAS postdoc.

Do you hear that? The incessant typing? The coffee machines vending cup after cup? If you go to Building 40, or Building 32, Building 188, or to any one of the many graduate student offices around the world, you will hear the tap of key boards, the whir of disk drives, and even the occasional heated civil discussions with "elevated" voices.

For most particle physicists, memories of the dim and distant past when they couldn't yet use a computer are distinctly fuzzy. For Mahsana Ahsan, though, they're a little fresher: “I didn't have a chance to use computers during my studies due to lack of computer labs,” she explains. “When I first went to the US, I was only able to type an email very slowly.”

When the detector is running smoothly, neighbors in the ATLAS control room sometimes get conversational. A few days back I was on shift, quietly looking at plots on the monitor in front of me, trying to decide if one small sensor was misbehaving or not. “I have a question,” the shifter next to me said.

In the evening of Saturday May 15, we have reached a new peak luminosity record of 6 10²⁸ cm^-2s^-1

“I‘m very outgoing,”says Lucie de Nooij, without hesitation.“That may be a Dutch thing, but it‘s also very much me.”

Although he was a self-professed ‘bookworm’ up until his PhD days at Panjab University, Nitesh Soni somehow never expected to become a research scientist. “I was actually preparing for the Indian Administrative Services exam,” he recalls, an essential step on the path to becoming a Police Commissioner or Deputy Commissioner. “So I just joined particle physics research for a second option. But then after four months, my supervisor sent me to Japan, which changed my life.”

It took a little bit of time, but the wait was worth it. The LHC has successfully achieved its first physics run with "squeezed beams"!

ATLAS has been designed to detect rare events in high energy proton-proton collisions. ATLAS ultimate goal is to measure events as rare as one in several thousand billions, but we are modest (for the time being) waiting for the luminosity to rise.

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.

Now that the LHC has established colliding stable beams at a center of mass energy of 7 TeV, the next step to maximize its physics reach is to provide the most luminosity possible. As Leo posted, we need to increase the number of proton - proton collisions to make sure we have a chance of seeing the physics that we are looking for. The reason for that is because different p.hysics processes have different probabilities. These probabilities are referred to as cross-sections (in a vague reference to the particle's size). If one multiplies a cross section by a luminosity than what you get is a number of events.

I was home sick today, probably from the stress of getting ready for "M-Day" (aka Media Day), more likely though I finally succumbed to the cold that had been spreading through the Control Room. As it so happened, my laptop had been in the shop because it experience an "incident" (actually I just dropped it) last Monday (the week before Media Day), and I just picked it up yesterday.

Many collisions will be needed to unveil the secrets eventually hidden at the 7 TeV energy regime.

After decades of planning. After years of delays and immeasureable amounts of patience and hard work. The physics operations of the LHC has begun!

After ramping of the beams to 3.5 TeV and tuning, final checks, and some emotions due to an unforeseen beam dump, the 7 TeV collisions finally appeared on the on-line monitors of the ATLAS Control Room.

During this morning LHC has been working to give us the beam conditions for collisions.

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.

So how will this whole "First 7 TeV Collisions" event happen? Well, here is my (somewhat naive) understanding of what will happen.

This Tuesday, if all goes according to plan, will mark the end of a very long journey for many High Energy Physicists. The first 7 TeV Collisions will signal the end of the the commissioning period of the LHC and its experiments.

Last night a new very important milestone has been reached by the LHC: two counter-circulating proton beams have been accelerated for the first time to 3.5 TeV, the energy that they should routinely reach in the 2010-2011 running period.

The first physics results from the ATLAS Experiment with proton-proton collisions at an energy of 0.9 TeV in late 2009 have now been accepted for publication in the journal Physics Letters B.

It has been a BUSY weekend! The LHC has been working around the clock get the machine commissioned, and ATLAS has been enjoying the many Firsts that have resulted.

Today ATLAS celebrates the role of women in physics its own way. ATLAS has encouraged its staff and users to place as many women as possible on shift in the control room and to serve as guides for official visits.