Category Archives: CERN

One more on the publications list

Finally the ATLAS book is out … with amazing 2604 authors on the list and about 1900 pages its quite a monstrous publication, but hey its also the larges experiment ever build by mankind ;)
Anyway … I myself took part in the sections on triggering (selecting) events containing top quarks.
In case you feel like having a look arXiv is your friend: arXiv:0901.0512

Going offline

Walking through CERN these days is extremely weired … there is hardly anyone left!
The LHC being on hold and now even the detectors being switched off more or less completely there is not much to do for many of us … even though I really can use some quiet-time to fetch up with things and to prepare my departure *sadness and happyness though*.
On Friday 5:30 pm CERN will be closed for holidays and the heating as well as a large fraction of the computers and hardware will be shut down until beginning of January …

LHC Status

After all the silence about the current status of the LHC, finally the management itself made some pictures of the incident public (even though it seem to have been by accident and has now been protected).
In a talk by the Director General himself [link] (now protected) some pictures indicate the damage caused by the incident on September 19th.

Julefrokost and Heike in town

Another year … another Julefrokost (or Christmas Lunch, if you prefer).
This time the first one (at least for me) outside of Copenhagen, but since most of the young guys, from my time at NBI, are at CERN these days not much of a change …
the menue was (too) great and big as usual … fish, fish, fish and pork, pork, pork … and of course a lot of alcohol … after all its a Danish Christmas party ;)
A lot of fun that was even increased by the fact that Heike was around for the weekend (unfortunately only for the weekend :( )

Education and Validation

Yesterday I spent about eight hours in my first CERN Guide Course to learn how to better understand, respond and deal with visitors.
We ended up doing little presentations of ourselfes/CERN/the itineraries at CERN in front of the others, the expert (being flown in from Paris) and the camera … yeah, and afterwards everyone would watch it again and analyse the whole thing.
But it turned out to be quite useful to get this kind of feedback …
Id addition we had couple of exercises on how to ask the right questions (which would uncovering instead of influencing questions !?!) …
Yeah … quite educative and also quite entertaining after all …
On Monday I will have my second (and for now last course) getting to know all the itineraries myself …

After that I just went to the ATLAS Control Room to see if anything was going on. Since I got all my shifts canceled this week I felt like I have to catch up a little …
So I was enjoying my first datataking of cosmic events … (which is actually not too exciting in itself) … but I had two of the experts around … so again this was another quite educative four and a half hours … which in the end seemingly brought my DCS Shift Validation … which makes me a Pixel Detector shifter now if everything is confirmed ;)