Just a small sneak preview of something I did in my recent spare time …


Finally in Athens!
After flying from Copenhagen to Frankfurt on Sunday, driving to Strasbourg with a rental car, spending two days at C.N.R.S. to look at CMOS sensors, driving by to Frankfurt by car and taking a flight from there to Athens, I know finally arrived at the Danish Institute in town.
To be a bit more precise, I went to Strasbourg to discuss a possible new project to get involved in and to have a look at CMOS detectors they build at C.N.R.S. that we wanna use in the experiment.
And now I am in Athens for about a week for a SMP (stable massive particles) sit-in!
On the plane to Athens I met Cédric a swiss pilot working for Aegean Airlines (greetz) and his lovely colleague who’s name I unfortunately forgot who recommended a few places in town that we might check out during the week …
Btw. the picture shows part of the Acropolis as seen from my balcony when I arrived in our apartment (about now)!
For those of you who can read German: the place shown in this article is exactly where I left the subway yesterday … quite a surprise!
Clouds made with particle beams: atmosphere and particle physics meet in the lab!
My new publication of the month might actually something I might get into touch with sooner or later …
CDF (one of the collider experiments at Fermilab) has just presented another update on their April paper on the invariant mass distribution of jet pairs produced in association with a W boson. In the latter one they discussed an excess in the 120-160 GeV/c^2 mass range with a significance of 3.2 sigma. They do not dare to give an exact number but claim to be closer to 5 sigma now!?
Unfortunately, though announced several times, the D0 collaboration has not published any similar analysis yet…
Also the result is not backed by all members of the collaboration …
so it remains exciting and CDF still owes us a good explanation …
Tonight the LHC continued the 2011 data taking with a new world record in luminosity of 4.67 x 1032cm-2s-1, breaking the previous record of the Tevatron of 4.0247 x 1032cm-2s-1.