Category Archives: LEGO

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

EPS-HEPP Outreach Prize

BYOPD, EPS, LEGO, Outreach

I am very honoured that today it was announced that I am one three people to receive the 2021 Outreach Prize of the High Energy and Particle Physics Division of the European Physics Society (EPS).

The award is mainly given for setting up ‘Build Your Own Particle Detector‘ as an international outreach programme that reaches to an unusually young audience and for the design of particle-detector interlocking-brick models, by now used at over 60 places around the world.

Find out more about the ‘Build Your Own Particle Detector’ programme, the original model of the ATLAS detector and other experiments not designed by myself, as well as previous and possible future events and workshops at build-your-own-particle-detector.org.

Congrats to Uta and Ken as well :)

ALICE in bricks

ALICE, CERN, Design, Hobbies, LEGO, Outreach, Physics

Over the past four months, and together with Christian Klein-Boesing, Marcus Mikorski and a few others, we have been running a workshop for high-school and early-university students to design and build the ALICE Experiment at CERN in LEGO bricks.
As part of the weekly meetings we had with the students we also introduced basic concepts of particle, heavy-ion and detector physics.

The workshop series was organised and funded by the ErUM-FSP T01 project “Expansion of ALICE at the LHC: experiments with the ALICE detector at CERN”, which in turn is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

The first models in real-live bricks are foreseen to be build end of June 2021 at Goethe University Frankfurt and University of Münster, with both their ALICE groups taking a leading role in this effort.

The designs and parts lists will be made available on the Build Your Own Particle Detector website to join the already existing LEGO models of other LHC experiments.

Here’s a few rough teaser renderings from the current state of affairs …

Stay tuned for more updates to come soon!

[edit] The project has also been presented at the spring meeting of the International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG) that started today.