I spent the last couple of days working on my Final Cut Pro X skills, preparing some videos for the ICHEP 2020 communication campaign of the ATLAS Collaboration.
We have asked some of our conference speakers, presenting some of the physics highlights of ATLAS during the conference to answer a few questions about their talk and the featured results and put together five video clips to be featured on the ATLAS Facebook page and in shorter teasers on the ATLAS Twitter channel.
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.
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 :)
Fifteen years ago, Tuesday 8 March 2005 at 9:57am, I received my CERN account, to start working for the ATLAS Experiment.
What started as an internship – chosen because of a lack of courses in the field I originally planned to pursuit, the physics of macromolecules – in the high-energy-physics group at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, turned into a stay at CERN during the Summer Student Programme and a Master’s thesis about the electron identification with the ATLAS transition-radiation tracker (internal) together with studies on a precision measurement of the W-boson mass.
During my PhD at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY in Zeuthen and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and various short stays at CERN I was mainly working on the commissioning of the ATLAS pixel detector (internal) and data-driven algorithms to determine the W+Jets background in events with pair-produced top quarks, and was involved in the startup of the German National Analysis Facility.
Going back to the Niels Bohr Institute as a postdoc, I started working on searches for unconventional signatures and long-lived particles and got stuck with that ever since.
I started out looking for heavy, charged long-lived particles, an analysis I continued also after moving to LMU Munich in 2014. Since then, I had the pleasure of leading two ATLAS physics subgroups – supersymmetry with R-parity-violating and long-lived signatures as well as exotics with unconventional and exotic Higgs decays – and joined a community effort in documenting the current status and harmonise searches for long-lived particles at the LHC. Amongst other things, I am currently also working on searches for Soft Unclustered Energy Patterns as signatures of strongly coupled Hidden Sectors and just finished my habilitation.
Besides physics analysis, especially looking for long-lived particles, I was always interested in science communication and education and have been involved in outreach projects since 2006. Highlights were and are certainly the design of the ATLAS LEGO model in 2011, the creation of the ‘Build Your Own Particle Detector‘ programme in 2013 and running it since, the coordination of the ATLAS contribution to the 2019 CERN Open Days, and the still ongoing work on a new ATLAS Visitor Centre. Since 2018, I am also an Education & Outreach coordinator for the ATLAS Collaboration.
I hope to have quite a few more years within ATLAS and other collaborations …
Yesterday, I officially finished my habilitation at LMU Munich by picking up my diploma.
So from now on it’s not just Dr. rer. nat. it’s also Dr. habil.
My last deed in the process, I did already on 5 February with a scientific debate about my main research topic: “Searches for new physics in signatures of long-lived particles”. Hopefully soon, following some more paperwork, I will also have my venia legendi and be a Privatdozent for experimental physics at LMU Munich.
