Category Archives: Outreach

ALICE in bricks

ALICE, CERN, Design, Hobbies, LEGO, Outreach, Physics

Over the past four months, and together with Christian Klein-Boesing, Marcus Mikorski and a few others, we have been running a workshop for high-school and early-university students to design and build the ALICE Experiment at CERN in LEGO bricks.
As part of the weekly meetings we had with the students we also introduced basic concepts of particle, heavy-ion and detector physics.

The workshop series was organised and funded by the ErUM-FSP T01 project “Expansion of ALICE at the LHC: experiments with the ALICE detector at CERN”, which in turn is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

The first models in real-live bricks are foreseen to be build end of June 2021 at Goethe University Frankfurt and University of Münster, with both their ALICE groups taking a leading role in this effort.

The designs and parts lists will be made available on the Build Your Own Particle Detector website to join the already existing LEGO models of other LHC experiments.

Here’s a few rough teaser renderings from the current state of affairs …

Stay tuned for more updates to come soon!

[edit] The project has also been presented at the spring meeting of the International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG) that started today.

Working on Motion skills

ATLAS, Design, Outreach, Video editing

In addition to working on my video-editing skills in Final Cut Pro X recently, I have also spent some time looking into Motion by Apple to design a few drafts for new animated logos for the ATLAS Collaboration.

We’ve already used a first draft for one of the animations in our recent summary of the ATLAS ICHEP 2020 highlights and I am still working a few more ideas.

Continue reading Working on Motion skills →

Working on the Final Cut

ATLAS, Design, Outreach, Video editing

I spent the last couple of days working on my Final Cut Pro X skills, preparing some videos for the ICHEP 2020 communication campaign of the ATLAS Collaboration.

We have asked some of our conference speakers, presenting some of the physics highlights of ATLAS during the conference to answer a few questions about their talk and the featured results and put together five video clips to be featured on the ATLAS Facebook page and in shorter teasers on the ATLAS Twitter channel.

Continue reading Working on the Final Cut →

Colliding Colour

Art, ATLAS, Hobbies, LHC, Outreach, Physics

May I present ‘Colliding Colour’.

A little art project, inspired by particle physics collisions, that I have been fiddling around with for a while now. Here you can see “Collision #7”, one of the results of the current setup.

Just like in a collision in the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, particles of colour collide at high energy and create a seemingly chaotic pattern in the detector. Admittedly, the energies are nowhere near those at the LHC and unlike in (real) high-energy collisions the outgoing ‘particles’ are still those that went into the collision, but yet there is a few commonalities. It is also coloured particles that collide in the LHC and the conservation of energy and momentum holds also in the Colliding Colours setup (even on a classical level).

If you want to see more, please have at my project page or directly on Instagram or Twitter.

You can find a making-of video for ‘Collision #8’ on YouTube.