It's been a busy weekend for ATLAS. Last night, well, actually early this morning, we received the "stable beam" flag from the LHC.

Leading up to the lowering of the pixel detector into the ATLAS cavern, final preparations were proceeding quickly.

Following the successful combined SCT/TRT barrel test in the Spring 2006, a similar combined SCT/TRT endcap test is currently being performed in the SR1 building on the ATLAS experimental site at CERN. One quadrant of the SCT and two sectors of the TRT have been cabled up and are used in this test. The data taking and combined testing is expected to last until December 11th.

After almost 15 years of R&D and prototyping, the ATLAS pixel detector is finally almost ready for installation in ATLAS, and its first rendez-vous with colliding beams!

Wednesday 23rd August was a memorable day for the Inner Detector community as they witnessed the transport and installation of the central part of the inner detector (ID-barrel) into the ATLAS detector.

The first few months of 2006 saw the delivery to CERN of the final components of the ATLAS semi-conductor tracker (SCT), namely the completed SCT end-caps.

The SCT barrel was inserted in the TRT on 17 February, just missing Valentine's day. This was a change of emphasis for the two detectors. In the preceeding months there had been a lot of focus on testing their performance. The TRT had been observing cosmic rays through several sectors of the barrel. The two detectors had to be painstakingly aligned to be concentric to within a millimetre.