Category Archives: LEGO

EPS-HEPP Outreach Prize

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

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.

CERN Open Days

The CERN Open Days are already fading away, even though it was an adventure that already started in July 2018. I had the pleasure of coordinating the ATLAS activities for this 75k-visitors event together with Anna Sfyrla, Laetitia Bardo and a great team of about a dozen ATLAS members that helped us by coordinating one of our activities.

During the Open Days, which started with an underground-only family day on Friday afternoon and lasted until Sunday evening, almost 300 ATLAS members joined as volunteers to make the ATLAS activities – as far as I am concerned – a huge success.

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