Last week, I was at the 2026 IEEE Quantum Week in Toronto, Canada, to once again represent Munich Quantum Valley (MQV), this time joined by some of our partners and start-ups.
A week full of quantum sessions, discussions at the booth, a Bavarian evening reception, and many more things as well as a bit of Toronto.
Today, my ATLAS Lego model at the ATLAS Visitor Centre1 was briefly featured in a short ‘Sportschau’ report related to the Tour de France, which covered CERN, on the main German broadcaster ARD :)
For those of you speaking German, here’s the link to the clip [in German].
What started as the main analysis and thesis topic for my last PhD student at LMU Munich in 2018 finally reached a major milestone this week.
Yesterday, the ATLAS Collaboration published our preprint on the arXiv titled ‘Search for soft unclustered energy patterns containing muons in the final state in pp collisions at s = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector1.
Given that most of the four-person analysis team only worked on the analysis part-time for most of the time, and I only worked on it in my spare time after starting at Munich Quantum Valley in 2022, it took us a couple more years to complete all the cross-checks and overcome the challenges of what is truly a search for an exotic and unconventional signature (as the respective analysis groups are called within ATLAS).
If you are interested in Hidden Valley / Hidden Sector extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics with a strongly interacting QCD-like hidden force .. or if that’s all just gibberish and you’re just curious, then have a look ;)
Thanks a lot to Alex (my former student), Ligang and Simone as well as everyone within ATLAS that supported us and the analysis over the years!
Update 12 June: Now there’s even an ATLAS Briefing about the analysis.
Time for another Open Day at the research campus in Garching (‘Forschungscampus Garching’). Once again, around 40 research institutes and companies on the campus will open their doors on 3 October from 10 am to 5 pm and once again I am taking care of the website of the event: https://forschungscampus-garching.de/.
Munich Quantum Valley (MQV) will be present with a booth at the Walther Meißner Institute (WMI) and Build Your Own Particle Detector (BYOPD) will be present at the ORIGINS booth .. along with lots of other activities, exhibits, projects to explore.
This week, I had the great pleasure to speak about the history, prospects and status of quantum technology and about Munich Quantum Valley (MQV) at the annual meeting of the German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA), the DPMAnutzerforum as well as at one of the local Lions Clubs in Munich.
