After a two-year shutdown, the first beams of Run 2 circulated in the LHC last Sunday. On Tuesday, the LHC operators performed dedicated runs to allow some of the experiments to record their first signals coming from particles splashed out when the circulating beams hit the collimators. Powerful reconstruction software then transforms the electronic signals into colourful images. >>

The major news this week is, of course, the start of LHC Run 2. Things went smoothly once the short circuit to ground in sector 3-4 had been resolved on 31 March, and by the time of the morning meeting at the CERN Control Centre on Easter Sunday, everything was ready to thread a beam around the machine. The meeting wrapped up at around 9.45, and by 10.41 the anticlockwise beam had made its first complete orbit. The clockwise beam completed its first turn at 12.27. >>

Since the last report, the commissioning with beam was delayed after a short to ground appeared in the cold mass of the main dipole chain in sector 3-4. After a remarkable team effort coordinated by the Machine Protection group, a procedure to burn away the small piece of metallic debris that was causing the earth fault was conceived, prototyped, tested and deployed. The intervention was successfully completed on the afternoon of 31 March and the first beams circulated in the LHC on Sunday, 5 April. Just a few days later, at just past midnight on Friday, 10 April, beam was ramped up to 6.5 TeV. >>

After two very intense years of activity during which the TOTEM apparatus has gone through an extensive upgrade programme, the collaboration is now ready to explore the new territories in forward physics that will open at 13 TeV. >>

Summer is coming - and with it, a new Microcosm exhibition showcasing CERN (see here). But while the new exhibit is preparing to enchant visitors, many have been asking about the site's former content. Will it simply be out with the old and in with the new? Not as such! >>

Congrats to all those who spotted that our last contribution to the CERN Bulletin (“CERN Secure Password Competition” – see here) was an April Fools’ Day hoax. Of course, there is no review and no jury and there won’t be any competition. Consequently, we are sorry to say that we cannot announce any winners. The extension of the password history rule and the initiative of finding password duplicates are absolute nonsense too. >>