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.
It took some time, but now I finally managed to finish the next twist in Particle Twister.
My game idea that I designed and realised together with Katarina Anthony during my ‘more active’ time at the ATLAS Experiment at CERN finally got the first set of long-promised playing cards for additional fun and challenges in addition to the classic spinning wheel – all that in my brand new Progressive Web App (PWA).
You can use it online at and install it locally from https://particle-twister.mehlhase.info/.
Let me know if you have more ideas for cards, playing modes or features.
I still have a few more ideas, so stay tuned for updates …
Today, I got a little my little share certificate for the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics that was awarded to the ATLAS Collaboration and other three large LHC collaborations.
As announced already back in April, the prize was awarded for detailed measurements of Higgs boson properties, confirming the symmetry-breaking mechanism of mass generation, the discovery of new strongly interacting particles, the study of rare processes and matter-antimatter asymmetry, and the exploration of nature at the shortest distances and most extreme conditions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
I am happy to have been (and to tiny extent still am) part of this adventure.
Congratulations to all co-reciepients :)
