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 …
With the LHC turned off, LS2 will also be a great chance for anybody to visit ATLAS (starting from May this year). Last week I managed to renew my underground training and therefore had the chance to see our beauty myself (see pictures) after quite some time. Besides the visits there is also lot’s of other things happening this year … CERN Open Days, a new ATLAS Visitor Centre, lots of new results … just to name a few.
It’s almost Advent and once again it’s time for some brain gymnastics. Both the ‘MATHEON calendar‘ (mathematics) and the ‘Physics in Advent‘ calendar are available again this year. There’s also a juniors math version called ‘Mathe im Advent‘.
Feel free to share their Facebook (#PhysicsInAdvent) and Twitter (@PhysicsInAdvent) pages/posts/tweets and help spread the word!
In case you happen to run an exhibition design company, why don’t you have a look at my first ever European CERN price enquiry for the “Design and Construction of the new ATLAS Visitor Centre“, released just a few minutes ago (deadline 19 November 2018).
ATLAS has been thinking about a new ATLAS Visitor Centre (current version seen in the picture above) for a couple of years already, but it seems we are finally getting close. I had the pleasure of learning how to prepare the relevant documents and the politics behind them (thanks to those that helped me) and will continue to lead this effort from the ATLAS side. We hope to have a new Visitor Centre by summer 2019, well enough in time for next year’s CERN Open Days (14/15 September 2019).
I’m very much looking forward to what people will come up with and many more things to learn in the process …
