Category Archives: Germany

Canoeing on the Regen

Family & Friends, Germany, Hobbies, Travelling

This week, we went canoeing on the Regen river. We started at the Blaibach reservoir, which is located at kilometre 107, and paddled all the way to the Danube junction in Regensburg.

Spread over five days, we covered around 20 kilometres a day, totalling 107 kilometres, and spent the night in Cham, Roding, Nittenau and Ramspau (Regenstauf). We got the four-person canoe from Zankl and enjoyed four wonderful stays at the Hotel am Regenbogen, the Gasthof Hecht, the Campingplatz Nittenau and the Ramspauer Hof, respectively.

While it wasn’t exactly relaxing, being surrounded by nature and staying in nice places with good food at the end of the day made it a very enjoyable experience overall.

You can find some pictures and a map showing the route, places where we got or could have gotten off, and more below.

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Quantum 2025

Berlin, Germany, Humboldt Universität, Munich Quantum Valley, Outreach, Physics, Quantum Science

Today, I had the pleasure of attending the official opening of the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology in Germany, hosted by the German Physical Society at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

For me, it was not only the beginning of the celebration of 100 years of quantum science, but also a return to the place where I started my physics studies back in 2001.

Apart from that, we are also working on a number of events and activities within the Munich Quantum Valley to celebrate the quantum anniversary. You can find our ever-growing program for the general public on our dedicated MQV Quantum 2025 website.

Here are some impressions from the event, which included a talk by Nobel Laureate Wolfgang Ketterle to set the stage for the year:

My corona live life blog

Family & Friends, Germany, Munich

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 …

First of all, for those of you that are still wondering about the why, here is two interesting reads: Tomas Pueyo at Medium.com and Harry Stevens at WashingtonPost.com.

In the following live life blog, I’ll focus on a few specific, mostly non-work, activities whenever something comes up …

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15 years in ATLAS

ATLAS, Berlin, CERN, Copenhagen, Denmark, DESY, France, Geneva, Germany, Humboldt Universität, LHC, LLP, LMU, Munich, Niels Bohr Institue, Outreach, Physics, Switzerland

Fifteen years ago, Tuesday 8 March 2005 at 9:57am, I received my CERN account, to start working for the ATLAS Experiment.

What started as an internship – chosen because of a lack of courses in the field I originally planned to pursuit, the physics of macromolecules – in the high-energy-physics group at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, turned into a stay at CERN during the Summer Student Programme and a Master’s thesis about the electron identification with the ATLAS transition-radiation tracker (internal) together with studies on a precision measurement of the W-boson mass.

During my PhD at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY in Zeuthen and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and various short stays at CERN I was mainly working on the commissioning of the ATLAS pixel detector (internal) and data-driven algorithms to determine the W+Jets background in events with pair-produced top quarks, and was involved in the startup of the German National Analysis Facility.

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 …