Category Archives: Hobbies

Colliding Colour

Art, ATLAS, Hobbies, LHC, Outreach, Physics

May I present ‘Colliding Colour’.

A little art project, inspired by particle physics collisions, that I have been fiddling around with for a while now. Here you can see “Collision #7”, one of the results of the current setup.

Just like in a collision in the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, particles of colour collide at high energy and create a seemingly chaotic pattern in the detector. Admittedly, the energies are nowhere near those at the LHC and unlike in (real) high-energy collisions the outgoing ‘particles’ are still those that went into the collision, but yet there is a few commonalities. It is also coloured particles that collide in the LHC and the conservation of energy and momentum holds also in the Colliding Colours setup (even on a classical level).

If you want to see more, please have at my project page or directly on Instagram or Twitter.

You can find a making-of video for ‘Collision #8’ on YouTube.

Let me take you on a tour to the ATLAS Experiment

ATLAS, CERN, Hobbies, Movies, Outreach, Physics

Today we published a 360-degree guided video tour to the ATLAS Experiment I recorded already back in February and recently finished editing.
You won’t need a helmet or solid shoes for this tour and you’re welcome to bring your kids along. This special tour will even take you places you wouldn’t be able to see on a regular tour on site, and you’ll have the chance to look around by yourself.
Last but not least, you can get yourself a Google Cardboard, put your mobile phone into it and enjoy the tour in virtual reality, making it an even more immersive experience.

It’s my second larger Final Cut Pro project after our little ATLAS–LEGO-stop-motion stay-at-home activity :)

CERN Open Days

CERN, Geneva, LEGO, Outreach

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.

Continue reading CERN Open Days →

Holidays by the sea

Family & Friends, Germany, Photography, Travelling

I just returned from holidays at both the North and the Baltic Sea.
One week each in Garding on Eiderstedt and Fährdorf on Poel.

We had a very nice time watching the water come and go at the North Sea, walking the mud flats and dikes, taking a boat trip to see seals, porpoises and other animals living the sea, visiting the wonderful Multimar Wattforum and other nice places. Had some good food (lot’s of fish) and a lot of wind and quite a bit of rain.

On Poel the weather changed for the better and we had beach time, sand-castle (or figures) building, paddling tours on the Breitling (Bay of Wismar) and lot’s of other things.

Here’s a few pictures from both seas, some of which also made it to my gallery.

LHCP2019

ATLAS, LHC, Mexico, Outreach, Physics, Puebla, Travelling
taken from https://indico.cern.ch/event/687651/
Conference picture taken from https://indico.cern.ch/event/687651/

This week, I had the pleasure of participating in the 7th edition of the Large Hadron Collider Physics Conference (LHCP) in Puebla, Mexico.

Besides talking about latest updates on “Searches for long-lived particles in ATLAS” and “Particle Physics Outreach as a Strategic Pillar for Society: A report from IPPOG”, as well as presenting posters on “Communicating ATLAS: adapting to an ever-changing media landscape” and “ATLAS Outreach: on the dissemination of High Energy Physics and Computer Sciences“, I also had the chance to see a – way too tiny – bit of Mexico during the week.

Unfortunately, due to the cancellation of my original flight to Mexico and the resulting late arrival, an extremely persistent jet lag waking we up at around 3am each day, and the fact that I already had to leave on Friday, there wasn’t really any time to explore much of Mexico. So I could only see a bit of Puebla’s city centre and – through the conference excursion – the archeological site of Teotihuacan.

Quite an intense week with lots of physics (see timetable), little sleep, lots of Mexican food and many people to meet. If only Mexico wasn’t a twelve-hour flight away …

Continue reading LHCP2019 →