This weekend, just after the ATLAS Germany meeting, I decided to stay a bit longer in Munich to visit some friends (greets Julia and Christoph), see the city and visit the famous Oktoberfest.

Well … the ATLAS meeting was fine, the meeting of friends was nice, the city was/is okay … just the Oktoberfest turned out to be even more disappointing than expected … just a very big funfair!
Whereas the prices and number of drunk people and the level of drunkenness seems to be connected to this enormous size …

The CERN press release states 10h28 am this morning as the official time for the first LHC beam to make the full turn. Its a big success and the first step towards full operation of the LHC, I guess somewhat next year.

In parallel I was at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research in Berlin at one of four connected press conferences in Germany that offerer journalists to ask questions about the start-up e.g. to Prof. Dr. Rolf Heuer, the designated general director of CERN.

Also ATLAS made some first measurements with beam on. Some pictures/event displays are linked here:

Some press releases:

• Heise.de (German)
• Heise.de (German)
• Tagesschau.de (German)
• BBC News
• Zoomer.de (German, featuring me in a video sniplet)

Another thing that happened today … the W-Mass paper I worked on along with Esben, Troels and others during my master studies got it’s first citation … woohoo!

Our paper: “Re-evaluation of the LHC potential for the measurement of m_W.“
Cited in: “Strange, charm, and bottom flavors in CTEQ global analysis.” by Pavel M. Nadolsky