For Run 3 of the LHC (2022–ongoing), the ATLAS Collaboration decided to change how it stores and processes conditions data. The significant efforts that went into this change – and the motivations for them – were presented at the 26th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics in May.

Kevin Einsweiler is a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL). He joined the ATLAS Collaboration in 1993, playing an instrumental role in bringing US institutes into the LHC programme. He served as ATLAS Pixel Project Leader (2005-2009), Physics Coordinator (2011-2013) and Upgrade Coordinator (2014-2019).

Stefan Guindon, Christian Ohm and Caterina Vernieri describe the major ‘Phase II’ upgrades taking place to prepare the ATLAS detector for the High-Luminosity LHC.

The ATLAS Collaboration has completed the installation of “Phase-I” upgrades of the Liquid Argon Calorimeter (LAr). The upgrades improve the read-out speed of the calorimeter’s electronics and provide more efficient event-selection capabilities. These improvements will be pivotal for data-taking during the coming high-intensity runs of the LHC.

On Friday 28 May 2021, teams of physicists and engineers installed the final "wedge" of the first ATLAS New Small Wheel detector. This was an important milestone for the Collaboration, in preparation for the wheel’s installation in the ATLAS cavern later this summer.

It was in 2014, just a few months after my transition from ALICE to ATLAS, that I saw the mock-up for the first time: a full-scale wooden reproduction of the central portion of the ATLAS experiment, measuring some 8 metres high and wide.

Long Shutdown 2 (LS2) of the Large Hadron Collider commenced last week, as the accelerator powered down and the entry to the ATLAS cavern opened wide. Over the next two years, teams from across the ATLAS Collaboration will be upgrading and consolidating their experiment. On the agenda: the refurbishments of key electronics, the maintenance of various detector components and – critically – the installation of new detectors.