Just returned from my first IPPOG (International Particle Physics Outreach Group) meeting at CERN. Two and a half days of discussions and talks about outreach in particle physics, a visit to CERN IdeaSquare, and celebrating IPPOG’s (more or less) twentieth birthday.
IPPOG also just started a new EPS sponsored competition for school kids … send in your contributions until 7 January 2018!
Wow … what a weekend. After returning from the LHC LLP Workshop in Trieste at 7am on Saturday, I went straight to Garching to set up the scene for our 2017 Garching Open Day event starting at 11am. After getting home at 10pm I got started on the final preparations for Sunday’s 2017 Fotohalbmarathon. But one after the other …
Once again, and thanks to a great team, we had an exemplary Open Day event on Saturday … ATLAS live-info screens and posters, a button machine, a BYOPD competition, a large ATLAS LEGO model, short-film screenings throughout the day, a screening of “BBC Horizon – Inside CERN” in the evening, and several hundred people passing by (47 participants in the BYOPD competition) and chatting/discussing with us. The final QnA after the movie took longer than the movie itself :)
On Sunday I organised the ninth (my fifth) edition of our little version of a photo marathon, called Fotohalbmarathon. This year’s twelve topics followed the theme ‘Urban Globetrotter‘.
For both events the juries are still busy working out the best contributions ;)
Just returned from our very nice workshop on ‘Searches for long-lived particles at the LHC‘ in Trieste. Three intense days of reports, discussions and new ideas related to searches for exotic long-lived particles at the LHC and beyond, and me having the pleasure to give the closing talk on Friday. Given the tight schedule there was unfortunately not much time to actually see Trieste, but here’s a few impressions …
Just left the closing session of this year’s outside ATLAS Overview Week 2017 which took place in Bratislava, Slovakia. Besides the usual physics, detector and performances updates, we had our internal ATLAS25 celebration party on Thursday.
From the outreach side we presented and got people involved in various activities and presented some really nice videos documenting the past 25 years during the celebration.
Obviously there was also some (though not much) time to see the city, the castle, the Most SNP and to escape from the clutches of a corrupt policeman.
Last but not least, the ATLAS collaboration board just granted me the honour to be the next outreach co-coordinator, starting next March :)
Today we finally got to celebrate ATLAS’ 25th anniversary.
After many meetings, lots of preparation and with a great team, we managed to publish six very nice, short videos about various aspects of the ATLAS experiment and collaboration on Facebook live. Already by now, we got about 4000 views on these videos.
Luckily we also had some time for a beautiful and tasty ATLAS-CMS birthday chocolate cake in between.
