Monthly Archives: December 2011

The Italian wedding trip

Geneva, Italy, Snowboarding

Last weekend I went on a little trip to Italy to join in for the wedding party of two friends of mine (greetz to A & A). Along with the party, they scheduled some time for skiing and relaxation.

During last week, I then got the news that the skiing was cancelled due to too little snow on the slopes :(

Two days later I got an update saying that we wont ski because of too much snow on the pistes!?

A state that unfortunately didn’t change until our arrival on Saturday. This also ment that the location for the party and the dinner could not be reached :( But in a glorious re-booking effort they managed to find hotels in the lower village/town and a restaurant to fit all the about sixty people (mostly Italians). After a good night (in cowboy and indians costumes) we finally managed to do some skiing on Sunday before driving back to Geneva, from where I flew back with a two and a half hours delay on Monday morning (thanks for the night and dinner to J & J).

Almost forgot the Higgs thingy …

CERN, Physics

Ahh right … there was a big presentation this Tuesday at CERN.

Both ATLAS and CMS presented their latest and greatest on the Higgs hunt. And … after all the excitement before, I have to admit that I was slightly disappointed by the results. Sure they excluded a lot and yes they found some hints, but still everything is far from significant and there have been many examples of such discrepancies before … all disappearing after all. Actually ATLAS claimed to have fully excluded one of these previous effects. Well, I guess Rolf Heuer’s final words summarised the whole thing quite well … nothing definitely seem, nothing definitely excluded, let’s wait for next year’s data!

Experimental limits from ATLAS on Standard Model Higgs production in the mass range 110-150 GeV. The solid curve reflects the observed experimental limits for the production of Higgs of each possible mass value (horizontal axis). The region for which the solid curve dips below the horizontal line at the value of 1 is excluded with a 95% confidence level (CL). The dashed curve shows the expected limit in the absence of the Higgs boson, based on simulations. The green and yellow bands correspond (respectively) to 68%, and 95% confidence level regions from the expected limits.

Here you can find an explanation on what this image is actually showing.

More on slammed science

Berlin, CERN, DESY, Outreach

Just got an email with the links to the first Youtube videos from the Weltmaschine Science Slam in November.
Be aware that all is in German.

1. “Schwarze Löcher am LHC Teilchenbeschleuniger” (Sofie Wolf)
2. “Das ATLAS-Experiment” (me)
3. “Dark Matter: Kleine Teilchen, dunkle Massen” (Eike Middell)

?. “Die Naturgesetz-Maschine – Das Noether-Theorem” (Ulrik Günther)
?. “Von Flaschen, Mücken und UFOs – Der LHC-Teilchenbeschleuniger” (Clemens Lange)
?. “Zufall, Zonk und Z-Boson – Wahrscheinlichkeit und Monte-Carlo-Simulationen” (Martin Mamach)