Today the first (real) running period of the LHC ended. We’ll have a shutdown of about two years to repair, upgrade and whatnot the LHC and the experiments. And of course a lot of time to analyse the data we took in the past years … for the moment that still means searching for long-lived stable massive particles for me. Let’s see what comes next …
It’s official, CERN will have another Open Day in September this year.
On Saturday, September 28th you can visit CERN if you know someone working there and on Sunday, September 29th everybody can have a look!
On the previous Open Day in 2008, we managed to see all experiments and the tunnel during the friend-and-family day. So let me know if you wanna join this year’s tour (again).
I’ve already seen it a few months ago, but finally the CMS LEGO model went public on the web site of the high energy physics group of the University of Maryland.
I must say, it is a very nice piece of work!
Let’s see if I can convince my LEGO friends to produce a few of these as well!
It was a long, but successful day yesterday!
I spent about 17 hours at the institute, but besides a bit of ‘regular’ work we managed to set up small but quite nice exhibition about particle physics, the LHC and CERN in general and ATLAS in more detail. This year we also managed to show the ATLAS LEGO model for the first time at Kulturnatten. With no surprise, quite a success! There were actually people coming specifically to see the model! :)
In addition to the little exhibition we had an extra auditorium were set up ATLAS Virtual Visits for the first time in Copenhagen. We had in total four 30 minutes live connections to the ATLAS Control Room in Geneva, Switzerland. There were between twenty to thirty people in each session, that sometimes (actually quite a few of them) stayed longer than an hour to ask questions and listen both to the guys we had at CERN and us locally.
I might at some point also post a link to the recording of the sessions here. [link]
To round of the day, and to make yet a bit longer, we used our webcast hardware to set up a remote viewing room for Holger Beck‘s late night lectures, which were otherwise heavily ‘over-booked’.
So it was a long day, but I’m quite satisfied with what we managed to do!
… and the mission were some special shifts at point one, just above the ATLAS control room. Unfortunately the task did not give any credits within ATLAS, but to build my third ATLAS model in plastic bricks isn’t too bad of a job either.
To be more precise it’s actually a reassembly of the second model I build in Copenhagen, though had to take apart (at least in sections) before shipping it to CERN. Another specialty of this build is the fact that – and LEGO enthusiasts please excuse – I decided to use glue this time. Since this model, after being shown at researchers night this weekend, s supposed to be driven by car to Montreux for the ATLAS week during the next five days.
So I ended up sitting in a room with twenty computers, no window to open and the smell of glue in the air … Yeah!
Anyways, once again the model tuned out nice and hopefully it will survive the trip. I guess I’ll know tomorrow …
In the meantime I heard that also CMS managed to build a plastic brick version of their detector … I’ll post more details once I have them! Also that means LHCb will be my next mission ;)
