Honour & Glory – 2026 FIFA World Cup

Honour & Glory

After what felt like maybe too many – yet apparently not enough – matches, the 2026 FIFA World Cup has finally come to an end. Just like the World Cup itself, Honour & Glory was also a tight race until the very end, with favourites shifting back and forth.

Congratulations go to Marius for his first Honour & Glory win and to Simon for coming a close third. The trophies will soon be on their way to all the winners.

You can find all the stats and standings here and the football all-time stats have been updated as well.

Thanks to everyone for taking part and see you next time …

ATLAS Lego meets Tour de France

ATLAS, BYOPD, CERN, Geneva, LEGO, Outreach, Physics, Switzerland

Today, my ATLAS Lego model at the ATLAS Visitor Centre1 was briefly featured in a short ‘Sportschau’ report related to the Tour de France, which covered CERN, on the main German broadcaster ARD :)

For those of you speaking German, here’s the link to the clip [in German].

  1. I also had the pleasure to coordinate the design and installation of the current AVC. ↩︎

Acquarello – Cucina del Sole

Cooking, Germany, Munich

This week, with the kids on holidays and out of town, we finally managed to redeem a one-year-old birthday voucher for Mario Gamba’s Acquarello and had a very nice a-la-carte dinner for two.

Here’s a a few verbal and optical impressions of our very delicious self-made menu …

  • Fagottini amatriciana
  • Agnolotti del plin filled with Fassona beef on sage foam and sage butter
  • Veal chop with potato gratin and rosemary jus
  • St. Pierre fish fillet with asparagus
  • Transparent lemon fruit ravioli with yoghurt lime ice cream and coconut foam
  • Pineapple carpaccio / Mango / Coconut / Pina Colada ice cream

Soft Unclustered Energy Patterns

ATLAS, CERN, Hobbies, LMU, Physics
Event- data visualisation of an event from the signal region of our search for Soft Unclustered Energy Patterns1

What started as the main analysis and thesis topic for my last PhD student at LMU Munich in 2018 finally reached a major milestone this week.

Yesterday, the ATLAS Collaboration published our preprint on the arXiv titled ‘Search for soft unclustered energy patterns containing muons in the final state in pp collisions at s = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector1.

Given that most of the four-person analysis team only worked on the analysis part-time for most of the time, and I only worked on it in my spare time after starting at Munich Quantum Valley in 2022, it took us a couple more years to complete all the cross-checks and overcome the challenges of what is truly a search for an exotic and unconventional signature (as the respective analysis groups are called within ATLAS).

If you are interested in Hidden Valley / Hidden Sector extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics with a strongly interacting QCD-like hidden force .. or if that’s all just gibberish and you’re just curious, then have a look ;)

Thanks a lot to Alex (my former student), Ligang and Simone as well as everyone within ATLAS that supported us and the analysis over the years!

Update 12 June: Now there’s even an ATLAS Briefing about the analysis.

  1. Figures, tables and additional material available here. ↩︎