This year I returned to CERN, somewhere I am lucky to visit every now and then to photograph some of the mind-boggling things that are happening there. (Check out my last visit here). At the moment the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is shut down for maintenance and upgrade, which means that I got to go underground to photograph the ATLAS detector, one of the experiments that is analysing particle collisions, and one of the experiments involved in detecting the Higgs Boson particle. At 45m long, 25m in diameter, and weighing about 7000 tonnes, it is a beast.

I also visited magnet research facilities and a storage warehouse where we found, hidden away behind some crates, a full scale model of part of the ATLAS detector that was used for training (above).