Last week, I took the chance to represent Munich Quantum Valley (MQV) at the annual March Meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) in Las Vegas.
In addition to many fruitful discussions at the MQV counter at the Research in Germany booth, I also manage to join some of the sessions and see a bit of the town, for a second time.
We spent the last two weeks, and part of the summer holidays, in Italy ..
Passing by Lake Garda, we spent one night close to Verona, to then cross the Po plain, have a hiking stop at the Stone of Bismantova and cross the Ligurian Apennines to get to La Spezia.
I produced and just published a German version of the original overview video for the Belle II experiment at KEK in Japan. It’s now featured on the German Belle II YouTube channel and the German Belle II website, which I also helped to set up.
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 …
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 …
