Category Archives: Physics

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 :)

ATLAS detector slice

ATLAS, CERN, Design, Outreach, Video editing

In addition to new animated logos for video productions of the ATLAS Collaboration, I have been working on a revised, 1080p version of the animated ATLAS detector slice, showing the interaction of different particles inside the ATLAS detector.

Here’s a low-resolution preview …

… you can find the full-resolution version, along with still vector images of the empty detector slice, on the CERN Documents Server (CDS) now (stills and animated GIFs are here).

Note: The detector slice is based on earlier work/versions by Rebecca Pitt and Joao Pequenao.

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.

Working on Motion skills

ATLAS, Design, Outreach, Video editing

In addition to working on my video-editing skills in Final Cut Pro X recently, I have also spent some time looking into Motion by Apple to design a few drafts for new animated logos for the ATLAS Collaboration.

We’ve already used a first draft for one of the animations in our recent summary of the ATLAS ICHEP 2020 highlights and I am still working a few more ideas.

Continue reading Working on Motion skills →