Hard probes are indispensable tools to study the hot and dense quark-gluon matter created in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. They may either strongly interact with the surrounding medium, like partons being proxies of jets, or both their production rates and their passing through the medium might be unaffected by the final-state effects, as it is in this case of electroweak bosons. So they can provide information on both the properties of the final-state medium and the characteristics of the initial state. Recent ATLAS results on jets and electroweak bosons production in Pb+Pb and pp collisions are reviewed. On the other side, in ultra-peripheral collisions of heavy-ions, the two-photon interactions might be studied. Such a recent study of the light-by-light scattering process focussing on a possible observation of the axion-like particle is briefly discussed, and the new limits are obtained.