For many students, a summer internship is a rite of passage — and a gateway to future jobs. Looking for a valuable glimpse into what a future in physics might hold, dozens of university students from around the world headed to CERN to participate in the Summer Student Programme and engage with cutting-edge scientific research at the ATLAS Experiment. With the support of their supervisors, these students have been deepening their knowledge of particle physics, engineering and computing through challenging projects. These are the stories of 12 of these students.

“Multiculturalism” isn’t just a buzzword for ATLAS, it’s a way of life. With members of over 90 different nationalities – spanning every populated continent – ATLAS is a cultural experiment as much as it is a scientific one. Our new ATLAS Around the World series invites you to meet people from every nationality represented in the collaboration, to gain an insight into the individual journeys that brought them to particle physics. All are from very different backgrounds, but share the common goal of understanding our universe.

A few times a year, the large LHC collaborations such as ATLAS organise an internal overview session. This photo essay will take you to the most recent of these “ATLAS Weeks” – giving you a glimpse behind the curtain, and exploring this essential part of the collaboration structure and life.

The 52nd Rencontres de Moriond conference was held in La Thuile, Italy, from the 18 March to 1 April. The first week, which ran until 25 March, was devoted to the theme "Electroweak interactions and unified theories", while the second week was based on the theme of “QCD and high energy interaction”.

For many students, summer means sun and beach volleyball. For some, though, it is an opportunity to learn at ATLAS! Thanks to CERN’s Summer Student Programme, every year dozens of university students come to ATLAS to spend their holidays in this unique environment. During these three months they alternate between lectures and work, always supported by their supervisors. This summer, ATLAS hosted 50 students from 31 different countries. Here are some of their stories.

Women play key roles in the ATLAS Collaboration: from young physicists at the start of their careers to analysis group leaders and spokespersons of the collaboration. Celebrate International Women’s Day by meeting a few of these inspiring ATLAS researchers.

As final preparations were made for the start of the Large Hadron Collider's (LHC) Run 2, the ATLAS Control Room was the centre of activity. Here are images from the three days that were landmark events...

As ATLAS gears up to record data from proton collisions delivered by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at an unprecedented energy level, here are glimpses from the last two years of preparations.

For five days last week, 110 ATLAS collaborators worked in 10 different shifts to help clean and inspect the detector and the cavern that houses it before the toroid magnets are turned on.

It’s been two years since the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN jointly announced the discovery of a new boson consistent with the Higgs particle of the Standard Model. Since then, the Higgs boson has been intensely examined. We’ve measured its spin, its mass, its lifetime, and observed its decay into bosons and fermions. In the next run of the Large Hadron Collider, we hope to learn more about how it interacts with other particles and to make many more precise measurements of its properties. By doing, we hope to extend the limits of our current understanding of the fundamental components of nature, and to seek clues for discovery.

ATLAS physicists travelled with Physics Without Frontiers 2014, a project run by International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), to three Palestinian universities this April to share the joy of scientific research with 140 students.