ATLAS Outreach Co-coordinator Kate Shaw has been awarded the 2015 European Physical Society (EPS) Outreach prize "for her contributions to the International Masterclasses and for her pioneering role in bringing them to countries with no strong tradition in particle physics".

There's a new resident in ATLAS' Tile Hadronic Calorimeter (Tilecal) development laboratory: the last surviving UA2 central calorimeter module. After years at CERN's Microcosm exhibition, the module has found a new home next to prototype ATLAS Tilecals. Side-by-side, they illustrate the progress in sampling organic scintillator calorimeters over the past 35 years.

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

The first results using the record-breaking Run 2 data will be presented at the European Physical Society conference on High Energy Physics (EPS-HEP) in Vienna, 22-29 July. It will be an exciting opportunity to see how these first few weeks of data-taking have progressed.

CERN will be back at the Montreux Jazz Festival for its third annual workshop: 'The Physics of Music and The Music of Physics' on 9 July at 15:00 in Petit Palais. Live events from the ATLAS experiment mapped into music will feature as part of the event.

Run 2 of the LHC began this spring, bringing with it hopes and promise of new physics and discovery. One of many key items on the LHC shopping list is the existence of new spatial dimensions, a potential means to harmonise gravity in our theoretical understanding of nature.

The ATLAS Outstanding Achievement Awards 2015 were presented on 18 June to 26 physicists and engineers, in 11 groups, for their excellent work carried out during Long Shutdown 1 (LS1).

From Ars Electronica-style festivals to artists in residence programmes at scientific organisations, "art meets science" is a term that just keeps on trending. ATLAS visiting artist Agnes Chavez has taken a fresh look at the merging of the disciplines, adding a new one to the mix: "Art meets Science meets Education".

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...

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.

Today ATLAS and other particle physics experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began recording physics data from 13 TeV proton collisions, which allow for precision studies of the Higgs boson and other Standard Model particles, as well as the search for new particles with higher masses. The new data will bring a deeper understanding of nature.

ATLAS is ready for Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) where proton beams will be collided together at a higher centre of mass collision energy of 13 TeV, and reach higher luminosities than ever before.

On 20 May at around 22:24, ATLAS recorded the first 13 TeV test collisions delivered by the Large Hadron Collider. The proton collisions set a new high energy record, marking the beginning of ATLAS' journey into unexplored physics frontiers as we prepare for production data-taking, scheduled to start in early June.

There is the Large Hadron Collider and then there are its experiments. When the collider is ready to circulate proton beams, the experiments have to be ready to receive them.

On the morning of 5 May 2015, ATLAS recorded the first scheduled proton beam collisions since the Large Hadron Collider and its experiments started up after two years of maintenance and repairs.

ATLAS uses "beam splash" events to provide simultaneous signals to large parts of the detector, and verify that the readout of different detectors elements are fully synchronized. After the first 2015 Large Hadron Collider beam circulation on Easter Sunday, a run dedicated to taking beam splash events was set up on Tuesday evening, 7 April.

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.

The first long shutdown of the Large Hadron Collider has now ended, after two years of intense but careful activity refurbishing and improving many aspects of ATLAS, mirroring the work to prepare the LHC for collisions at the new energy of 13 TeV.

On 17 March, ATLAS presented their latest Higgs physics results at an LHC seminar at CERN from data collected during the LHC's first run. The updated results include searches for the Higgs boson in association with top quarks, measurements of the spin and parity, and improved and combined coupling measurements, all showing good compatibility with Standard Model predictions. These results are also being presented at the 50th Rencontres de Moriond ElectroWeak conference, in La Thuile, Italy, this week.

Rajaâ Cherkaoui El Moursli is one of the five laureates of the L'Oreal-UNESCO for Women in Science Awards this year.

The dataset from the ATLAS Higgs Machine Learning Challenge has been released on the CERN Open Data Portal.

Six PhD students were announced as the winners of the ATLAS Thesis Awards 2014 from 28 nominations received. The winners – Andrew Chisholm, Kun Liu, Marcus Morgenstern, Priscilla Pani, Dennis Perepelitsa, and James Saxon – were given certificates and an engraved glass model of the ATLAS detector during a ceremony on 19 February 2015 at CERN, Geneva.

The recipients of the second ATLAS PhD Grant were announced last week. The three young ATLAS physicists – Danijela Bogavac, Silvia Fracchia, and Declan Millar – were given certificates at a small ceremony at CERN, Geneva.

After completing more than 250 work packages concerning the whole detector and experimental site, the ATLAS and CERN teams involved with Long Shutdown 1 (LS1) operations are now wrapping things up before starting the commissioning phase in preparation for the Large Hadron Collider's restart. The giant detector is now more efficient, safer and even greener than ever thanks to the huge amount of work carried out over the past two years.

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.