Today we published a 360-degree guided video tour to the ATLAS Experiment I recorded already back in February and recently finished editing. You won’t need a helmet or solid shoes for this tour and you’re welcome to bring your kids along. This special tour will even take you places you wouldn’t be able to see on a regular tour on site, and you’ll have the chance to look around by yourself. Last but not least, you can get yourself a Google Cardboard, put your mobile phone into it and enjoy the tour in virtual reality, making it an even more immersive experience.
In these special times during the COVID-19 pandemic and while staying at home and practicing social distancing day and night, I thought about having an online game night with friends and remembered the good old classic You Don’t Know Jack game I had on my PC ages ago.
Turns out, I actually bought a few Jackbox Party Packs and some other Jackbox Games via HumbleBundle over the years and I just completed my Steam collection via a special offer on Green Man Gaming.
So I wanted to give a quick run-down on which games there are, which one I/we like most and what worked well for us.
Jackbox Games actually released a tutorial page on how to play their games with remote friends. Somehow Twitch and Youtube don’t (yet) work well for me, but both Skype and Zoom did a fine job (despite the sound coming through the mic together with my speech). Also they have some games on sale, or even for free, right now on Steam and elsewhere.
For all games you need one computer running the games and a (mobile) device with a browser for each player. That’s it. And while the number of players is limited, many of the games allow for an almost unlimited number of spectators (audience), which can still take part as an extended jury.
Given the certainly very unique situation caused by the current corona pandemic, I decided to set up a little live blog to document the next couple of weeks representing a mixtures of home office, home schooling, home day care and whatever is yet to come …
Going back to the Niels Bohr Institute as a postdoc, I started working on searches for unconventional signatures and long-lived particles and got stuck with that ever since.
I started out looking for heavy, charged long-lived particles, an analysis I continued also after moving to LMU Munich in 2014. Since then, I had the pleasure of leading two ATLAS physics subgroups – supersymmetry with R-parity-violating and long-lived signatures as well as exotics with unconventional and exotic Higgs decays – and joined a community effort in documenting the current status and harmonise searches for long-lived particles at the LHC. Amongst other things, I am currently also working on searches for Soft Unclustered Energy Patterns as signatures of strongly coupled Hidden Sectors and just finished my habilitation.
Besides physics analysis, especially looking for long-lived particles, I was always interested in science communication and education and have been involved in outreach projects since 2006. Highlights were and are certainly the design of the ATLAS LEGO model in 2011, the creation of the ‘Build Your Own Particle Detector‘ programme in 2013 and running it since, the coordination of the ATLAS contribution to the 2019 CERN Open Days, and the still ongoing work on a new ATLAS Visitor Centre. Since 2018, I am also an Education & Outreach coordinator for the ATLAS Collaboration.
I hope to have quite a few more years within ATLAS and other collaborations …
Yesterday, I officially finished my habilitation at LMU Munich by picking up my diploma. So from now on it’s not just Dr. rer. nat. it’s also Dr. habil.
My last deed in the process, I did already on 5 February with a scientific debate about my main research topic: “Searches for new physics in signatures of long-lived particles”. Hopefully soon, following some more paperwork, I will also have my venia legendi and be a Privatdozent for experimental physics at LMU Munich.
