While the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations remains the LHC's crowning achievement, the ATLAS Collaboration has since produced a wealth of groundbreaking results that continue to reshape particle physics. In this feature article, Andreas Hoecker delves into the remarkable breakthroughs uncovered by ATLAS using Run 2 data.

The ATLAS Collaboration submitted four documents to the European Strategy Group (ESG), namely, an overview of the extensive ATLAS detector upgrade for the HL-LHC, a summary of the software and computing preparations to address the HL-LHC challenges, a joint update with CMS on HL-LHC physics expectations, and a joint document on prospectives for flavour physics.

This year’s 50th anniversary edition of the “Moriond Electroweak and Unified Theories” conference at La Thuile in Italy featured the presentation and discussion of first results from the LHC full-year 2015 data samples (“Run 2”) collected by the LHC experiments at unprecedented 13 TeV proton-proton collision energy.

After a shutdown of more than two years, Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is restarting at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV for proton–proton collisions and increased luminosity. This new phase will allow the LHC experiments to explore nature and probe the physical laws governing it at scales never reached before.