SA-ATLAS students witness the start of Run 3 @CERN

On the 5th of July 2022, a day after celebrating the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN, the LHC performed its first stable-beam collisions at a record energy of 13.6 TeV. These collisions took place around 4-5pm and they mark the start of Run 3 data taking period after more than three years of upgrade and maintenance work. Humphry Tlou, a Trigger and Data Acquisition (TDAQ) expert for the Tile Calorimeter (TileCal) system was invited to the ATLAS control room by the TileCal project leader, to monitor the TDAQ system during the first Run 3 collisions.  Onesimo Mtintsilana, began with her CALO/FWD shift at 4:00 p.m, roughly when it was planned for all detectors to switch on all of their subsystems and begin recording high-energy collisions at the unprecedented energy of 13.6 TeV. Her key responsibilities are to monitor detector status and data and react to problems and changes of the detector status