Category Archives: CERN

Bricks’n’Clips

Designing and building the first ATLAS model made of interconnectable plastic bricks (that’s what you name it if you cannot name it) was just the first of many things to be done.

After fighting and writing unsuccessfully to a whole bunch of people, I seem to have finally found the right person to be able to get hands on more bricks for more models. We’ll probably end up with models at quite a few institutes and exhibitions all around the world. But this is still work and mainly organisation in progress …

Besides that I started recording the construction manual video. After a first, slightly unsuccessful, attempt in my living room at home (I specifically set up lighting and a plate on top of my foosball table) and went out to collaboration with our media/outreach section. Today we have finally managed to set up a scene at the institute and started taking a few first shots. Due to the above mentioned collaboration and the resulting increase in professionalism (great camera, an actual camera operator, lighting and editing) I was convinced to shoot an intro clip. Which turned out to be the only thing we managed within today’s two hour session …
to my defence it features three different camera settings and three different languages (English, Danish, German)!

So there has been a lot of progress …
Still, there is also a lot of progress to be made ;)

Almost forgot the Higgs thingy …

Ahh right … there was a big presentation this Tuesday at CERN.

Both ATLAS and CMS presented their latest and greatest on the Higgs hunt. And … after all the excitement before, I have to admit that I was slightly disappointed by the results. Sure they excluded a lot and yes they found some hints, but still everything is far from significant and there have been many examples of such discrepancies before … all disappearing after all. Actually ATLAS claimed to have fully excluded one of these previous effects. Well, I guess Rolf Heuer’s final words summarised the whole thing quite well … nothing definitely seem, nothing definitely excluded, let’s wait for next year’s data!

Experimental limits from ATLAS on Standard Model Higgs production in the mass range 110-150 GeV. The solid curve reflects the observed experimental limits for the production of Higgs of each possible mass value (horizontal axis). The region for which the solid curve dips below the horizontal line at the value of 1 is excluded with a 95% confidence level (CL). The dashed curve shows the expected limit in the absence of the Higgs boson, based on simulations. The green and yellow bands correspond (respectively) to 68%, and 95% confidence level regions from the expected limits.

Here you can find an explanation on what this image is actually showing.

More on slammed science

Just got an email with the links to the first Youtube videos from the Weltmaschine Science Slam in November.
Be aware that all is in German.

1. “Schwarze Löcher am LHC Teilchenbeschleuniger” (Sofie Wolf)
2. “Das ATLAS-Experiment” (me)
3. “Dark Matter: Kleine Teilchen, dunkle Massen” (Eike Middell)

?. “Die Naturgesetz-Maschine – Das Noether-Theorem” (Ulrik Günther)
?. “Von Flaschen, Mücken und UFOs – Der LHC-Teilchenbeschleuniger” (Clemens Lange)
?. “Zufall, Zonk und Z-Boson – Wahrscheinlichkeit und Monte-Carlo-Simulationen” (Martin Mamach)