All posts by Sascha

First Pixel DCS Shift [Update]

CERN

Today I am having/had my first Pixel DCS (Detector Control System) Observer shift in the ATLAS Control Room.
Watching the baby from 15h to 23h … not much happening though!

In case you wanna be part of it … here you go! Live Webcams!
I am sitting in the front left arc in both pictures …

[Update]
It actually turned out to be two shifts in a row from 15h to ~7h … it got a bit more interesting at about midnight and when I finally managed to remind myself of the bus schedule I notice that the last one left already … voila, I stayed until the bus ran again and enjoyed the night shift, which was eventually more educative than my actual training shift …

What a weekend!!!

Berlin, CERN, Movies

This weekend I was back in the city of Berlin … and the weekend was BIG and exhausting!
I started out as black hole on Friday’s Halloween Party, continued as a guide talking about the LHC and stuff for about 5h at the Weltmaschine exhibition on Saturday (after just 4h30min of sleep), watched the new Coen Brothers movie “Burn After Reading” (which was amusing as usual) and had some very nice ‘price on request’ filet steak at Escados Berlin (hmmm tasty).
On Sunday I restarted with another 5h of talking about the LHC at the exhibition and had another nice dinner …

The end of an odyssey

Family & Friends, Geneva

Its done! After an almost three weeks long odyssey of trying four different drill machines with all sorts of different drill heads I finally managed to get all the wanted holes into my walls this morning!

Apparently my walls are made of super solid rock and only the forth of the drill machines could handle this situation. Thanks to everyone that took part in this odyssey by offering a drill machine.
And special thanks to Julie for offering the one that actually worked ;)

As a result of this I can finally have a house warming :)

Thinking about changing the field …X-rays from Sticky Tape

Physics

Ever heard about X-rays from sticky tape … never!?
There you go … its a new field! Still there has been a publication in Nature about exactly this subject.
Some of you might have seen light being emitted when pulling sticky tape, but these physicist could show that there is quite some X-rays comming out of these little bastards …
For everyone interested heres the publication:
“Correlation between nanosecond X-ray flashes and stick–slip friction in peeling tape”, Carlos G. Camara et al.; Nature, Vol. 455, S. 1089 (I cannot put a link due to copyright reasons)
There is a video showing the whole thing though!