Category Archives: Garching

Open Day in Garching

BYOPD, Garching, LEGO, Munich Quantum Valley, Outreach, Quantum Science

Last Thursday, 3 October 2024, I took part in the Open Day at Garching.

With over 80 venues and activities to visit and take part in, and thousands of people attending, it was quite an event.

I myself took part in the stand activities of the Munich Quantum Valley (MQV), moderated talks and discussions at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) and set up another ‘Build Your Own Particle Detector’ (BYOPD) competition as part of the activities of the ORIGINS Cluster of Excellence. Both the MQV stand and the BYOPD activity were well attended and we had quite a number of participants in the BYOPD competition … entries and results soon(ish) to come.

The official website for the Open Day, which I expanded and recoded over the past few weeks, also seems to have done a good job for the 6500 or so unique visitors on that day alone.

© MQV | Flavio Cury
© MQV | Flavio Cury

Getting an Open Day online

Computers and IT, Design, Garching, Munich Quantum Valley, Outreach, World Wide Web

Partly in my spare time and partly in my working time, I designed and coded the website for this year’s Open Day in Garching.

I had already built the site for last year’s event, but due to the much larger number of participating institutes, chairs and companies, this time I added a system to filter all the activities on campus based on language, target audience, formats and tags.

The site uses WordPress along with some modifications to both the theme and the code.
As part of our support for the event, the MQV team has been collecting and filling in all the information and content for all the activities. The design elements for the Open Day were provided by mattweis and I adopted them up for the website design.

There is still a lot of content to be added, but you can already get an idea of what to expect from the Open Day, which will take place on 3 October 2024 from 10am to 5pm.

MQV will be present with a booth and presentations at the LRZ: Leibniz Supercomputing Centre. Feel free to pass by to learn about MQV and the website ;)

In addition Build Your Own Particle Detector will be present, along with the Belle II and ATLAS Experiment, at the booth of the cluster of excellence ORIGINS.

From Quarks to Qubits

ATLAS, CERN, Copenhagen, Family & Friends, Garching, Geneva, Munich, Outreach, Physics, Quantum Science

After more than sixteen years at the ATLAS experiment it seems to be time for a change, and for me that change is going from quarks to qubits, and from a mix of fundamental research, teaching and science communication to a full-time job working on public engagement and didactics for the recently founded Munich Quantum Valley.

Continue reading From Quarks to Qubits →

IPPOG meeting,
ATLAS Week, Open Day

CERN, Garching, Geneva, LEGO, LMU, Outreach, Physics

The past ten days have been somewhat crazy (unfortunately the upcoming ones don’t seem to be calmer) …

From 4 to 6 October I joined the autumn meeting of the International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG) at CERN as the representative of the ATLAS Collaboration, listening to and discussing about worldwide efforts in particle physics science education and communication. IPPOG – a global network of scientists, science educators and communication specialists – welcomed four new members at the end of the meeting: Austria, Denmark, the LHCb Collaboration and the ALICE Collaboration. Amongst other things we had brainstorm session on possible new exhibits to improve and extend the IPPOG resource database and how to communicate the knowledge transfer from particle physics to society.

From 8 to 12 October I was at CERN for the ATLAS Collaboration Week as well as lots of other meetings. In an intensive though productive outreach session, we dedicated a large fraction of the time to the status of and future plans for ATLAS Open Data. On Thursday we had 39 students from LMU Munich over for a full-day visit to CERN, in particular the  Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) Control Room, the CERN Control Centre, the magnet-test facility (SM18) as well as the ATLAS Visitor Centre. And … hohoho … I witnessed a very special VIP (white-bearded guy dressed in red) visit to ATLAS last week ;)

Last but not least, on 13 October we had our annual Open Day in Garching, this time incorporated into the 150 years TUM celebrations (who shouldn’t get any credits, because they didn’t print our activity in the official programme … buh!). Similar to last year’s event, we had the ground floor of the Institute for Advanced Studies and showed the ATLAS LEGO model, hosted a Build Your Own Particle Detector event/competition and had a little particle physics exhibition with live event displays from CERN, short movies about ATLAS and CERN, the Netzwerk Teilchenwelt button machine and loads of discussions. Finally we hosted a screening of ‘BBC Horizon – Inside CERN‘, a documentary about the ‘famous’ 750 GeV bump in 2015 LHC data, as well as an extensive question-and-answer sessions afterwards.

ESO Supernova

Garching, Movies, Munich, Outreach, Physics

‘A New Supernova over Munich’, that’s the slogan of the ESO planetarium and visitor centre that opened recently. It’s not exactly above Munich, as Garching is a bit of a subway ride outside of town, but it’s certainly worth the trip!

They have a very nice permanent exhibition called “The Living Universe” which covers about everything from where we are to what we know about our Universe. There’s temporary exhibitions as well as a fantastic planetarium, with lots of different shows, on top of that. I’ve seen the “Phantom of the Universe” as well as “Two Small Pieces of Glass — The Amazing Telescope“, and they are both great movies. Obviously the former of the two has to be, as it features the ATLAS experiment and was in part done by ATLAS people (thanks for that).

The best part is, that both the exhibitions and the planetarium shows are (still) free of charge. So there’s really no excuse for not passing by!!