The ATLAS and CMS experiments hosted a virtual visit together with the IceCube Experiment in the South Pole for students from five different European schools on 2 October. The visit allowed the students to interact with researchers in both the LHC experiments and the IceCube experiment. The virtual visit was a second event in the Open Discovery Space project series' 'Bringing Frontier Science to Schools'.

For her contribution toward the discovery of the Higgs boson, Kerstin Tackmann was awarded the Young Scientist Prize in Particle Physics 2014 by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics.

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.

The ATLAS & CMS experiments celebrate the second anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson. Here, are some images of the path from the LHC's startup to the Nobel Prize, featuring a musical composition by Roger Zare, performed by the Donald Sinta Quartet, called 'LHC'. Happy Discovery Day!

Bringing the nine-storey high, many-layered ATLAS detector back to life and preparing it for the Large Hadron Collider's next run is a complex task. Each sub-detector is setup and thoroughly tested before they are joined and the detector as a whole can begin recording data again.

It's been four weeks since the four-month long Higgs Machine Learning Challenge was announced. Almost 700 teams have signed up and more than 200 have beaten the in-house benchmark already.

ATLAS presented new results at the Large Hadron Collider Physics (LHCP) Conference in Columbia University, New York, 2 to 7 June. Many new searches and improved measurements were presented, among which were an updated Higgs boson mass measurement, a search for double Higgs boson production and new searches for Supersymmetry and exotic phenomena.

Closest to the beam pipe where particle collisions will occur in the very heart of ATLAS, a new sub-detector – the Insertable B-Layer – was put in place on 7 May. The IBL team had been developing and practicing the insertion procedure and tooling for two years because of the operation’s delicate nature.

ATLAS has prepared a variety of new results for the Quark Matter 2014 conference using lead-lead (Pb+Pb) and proton-lead (p+Pb) data collected during Run1.

"Hunting the Higgs", published by Papadakis Publishers in collaboration with the ATLAS Experiment won the Bronze prize in the Science category of the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

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.

On 5 and 6 April, Michigan State University's ATLAS physicists who are based at CERN connected virtually via video-conference to visitors attending the annual Science Festival in East Lansing, USA, to talk about particle physics and what it is like to be a physicist.

The ATLAS Thesis Awards recognize some of our postdoctoral colleagues who have made exceptional contributions to the experiment, across all areas, in the context of a PhD thesis.

The first recipients of the ATLAS PhD Grant were presented with a certificate on 11 February at CERN by the programme’s selection committee. The three scholars, Lailin Xu of China, Josefina Alconada of Argentina, and Gagik Vardanyan of Armenia, were delighted at being able to continue their PhD programmes at CERN.

In the first run of the Large Hadron Collider, almost a billion proton-proton collisions took place every second in the centre of the ATLAS detector. That amounts to enough data to fill 100,000 CDs each second. If you stacked the CDs on top of each other, in a year it would reach the moon four times. Only a small fraction of the observed proton–proton collisions have interesting characteristics that might lead to discoveries. How does ATLAS deal with this mountain of data?

The ATLAS experiment released preliminary results on 26 Nov 2013 that show evidence, with a significance of 4.1 standard deviations that the Higgs boson decays to two taus, which are fermions. This is exciting news. But what makes this measurement important?

Hold out your hand and in one minute hundreds of muons will have passed through your palm. Muons are one of the high-energy cosmic ray particles that can pass through most solid structures – even the ATLAS detector’s calorimeter, which is designed to absorb particles and measure their energy. A specific system is required to measure muons. Until now, the ATLAS muon system was almost completed, but not quite. The last of the 62 chambers in the Extended Endcap (EE) region was installed just before summer this year.

On 8 October, the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Professors François Englert and Peter Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider".

More than 70,000 people visited CERN Open Days over the weekend, with 20,000 going underground to see the LHC tunnel and the detectors. Of these, an estimated 5,000 people visited the ATLAS exhibits aboveground, and another 2,500 had the opportunity to see the ATLAS detector.

Only a few more days to go before CERN opens its doors and our universe becomes yours on 28 and 29 September. With 35 surface sites and seven underground visits available, there will be plenty of activities for visitors of all ages.

Pernilla Craig earned her licence to fly last year aged just 17, making her one of UK’s youngest female pilots. A visit to CERN last week took her deep underground to see dectectors on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and into the sky above the Alps for a bird's eye view of the laboratory.

ATLAS today presented new searches for Supersymmetry, a theory that could explain the large amount of dark matter in the universe.

At the EPS HEP conference today, ATLAS released a new precise measurement of the top quark mass using events where both top quarks decay via W bosons to electrons or muons. ATLAS also presented limits on the possibility of the top quark decaying to channels not foreseen in the Standard Model. A comparison of the behaviour of top quarks and anti-top quarks produced at the LHC is in agreement with the prediction of the Standard Model, disfavouring models of new physics that require a large top/anti-top asymmetry.

ATLAS physicists will be presenting new results at the biennial Europhysics conference on High Energy Physics this year. The conference, which will take place 18 to 24 July in Stockholm, Sweden, is organized by the High Energy and Particle Physics Division of the European Physical Society (EPS).