Today we published a 360-degree guided video tour to the ATLAS Experiment I recorded already back in February and recently finished editing. You won’t need a helmet or solid shoes for this tour and you’re welcome to bring your kids along. This special tour will even take you places you wouldn’t be able to see on a regular tour on site, and you’ll have the chance to look around by yourself. Last but not least, you can get yourself a Google Cardboard, put your mobile phone into it and enjoy the tour in virtual reality, making it an even more immersive experience.
Going back to the Niels Bohr Institute as a postdoc, I started working on searches for unconventional signatures and long-lived particles and got stuck with that ever since.
I started out looking for heavy, charged long-lived particles, an analysis I continued also after moving to LMU Munich in 2014. Since then, I had the pleasure of leading two ATLAS physics subgroups – supersymmetry with R-parity-violating and long-lived signatures as well as exotics with unconventional and exotic Higgs decays – and joined a community effort in documenting the current status and harmonise searches for long-lived particles at the LHC. Amongst other things, I am currently also working on searches for Soft Unclustered Energy Patterns as signatures of strongly coupled Hidden Sectors and just finished my habilitation.
Besides physics analysis, especially looking for long-lived particles, I was always interested in science communication and education and have been involved in outreach projects since 2006. Highlights were and are certainly the design of the ATLAS LEGO model in 2011, the creation of the ‘Build Your Own Particle Detector‘ programme in 2013 and running it since, the coordination of the ATLAS contribution to the 2019 CERN Open Days, and the still ongoing work on a new ATLAS Visitor Centre. Since 2018, I am also an Education & Outreach coordinator for the ATLAS Collaboration.
I hope to have quite a few more years within ATLAS and other collaborations …
Luckily I also had multiple chances to see ATLAS this year, due to the Open Days preparations as well as several outreach projects we are working on, from more professional underground virtual visits to a 360 degrees virtual visit to the cavern.
And in the spirit of the holidays and competing with lasts year’s pictures, also this year we put together some season-inspired pictures … you’ll see more of that in the coming days ;)
(c) ATLAS/CERN
(c) ATLAS/CERN
(c) ATLAS/CERN
Last but not least, I also handed in my habilitation report a few weeks before Christmas. Let’s see if that helps in finding a new job net year …
The CERN Open Days are already fading away, even though it was an adventure that already started in July 2018. I had the pleasure of coordinating the ATLAS activities for this 75k-visitors event together with Anna Sfyrla, Laetitia Bardo and a great team of about a dozen ATLAS members that helped us by coordinating one of our activities.
During the Open Days, which started with an underground-only family day on Friday afternoon and lasted until Sunday evening, almost 300 ATLAS members joined as volunteers to make the ATLAS activities – as far as I am concerned – a huge success.
Unfortunately, due to the cancellation of my original flight to Mexico and the resulting late arrival, an extremely persistent jet lag waking we up at around 3am each day, and the fact that I already had to leave on Friday, there wasn’t really any time to explore much of Mexico. So I could only see a bit of Puebla’s city centre and – through the conference excursion – the archeological site of Teotihuacan.
Quite an intense week with lots of physics (see timetable), little sleep, lots of Mexican food and many people to meet. If only Mexico wasn’t a twelve-hour flight away …
