Category Archives: Physics

Nuit de la science

CERN, Geneva, LEGO, Outreach, Switzerland

2016-07-09-17-23-37-NuitDeLaScience

Last weekend I had a quick trip to Geneva. Aside the usual meetings at Cern, I had the pleasure to host another BYOPD event. This time as part of the ‘Nuit de la science‘ at the ‘Musée d’histoire des sciences‘ on invitation of the Atlas group at the University of Geneva.

With in total 17 hours plus preparation and clean-up time, it was quite a bit of work, but it was certainly a lot of fun again. We had over 80 contestants, ranging age three to 74, entering the competition and quite a few more people just chatting with us about particle physics, Cern, Atlas and whatnot.

We also had cloud chamber as well as the ATLASrift as part of the particle physics contribution.

Heavy long-lived charged R-hadrons

CERN, LMU, Physics

2016-06-17 05.00.07 pmToday the ATLAS Collaboration published our paper on the “Search for heavy long-lived charged R-hadrons with the ATLAS detector in 3.2/fb of proton-proton collision data at √s = 13 TeV” on arXiv and submitted it to Physics Letters B.

After quite some work and the usual back’n’forth of the internal review, I (hopefully) have some more time for the heaps of new data coming in these days.

Building yet another one down under

Australia, CERN, Outreach, Physics, Sydney

BYOPD squareLooks like I’ll have the chance to build yet another Atlas Lego model in Australia this summer.

Thanks to COEPP and the Powerhouse Museum, I’ll be in Sydney in August to build an Atlas Lego model with students as part of the Sydney Science Festival (FB) / National Science Week in Australia.
During the two-day event we’ll also have public sessions for visitors to build Nathan’s LHC micro models and the finished large model will be part of the CERN Collider exhibition hosted in the same place from 6 August to 30 October 2016.

Follow the BYOPD web site / Facebook site for more updates on this topic …

Wildlife vs. science

CERN, Geneva
Franco Atirador/Wikimedia Commons/GNU Free Documentation License
Franco Atirador/Wikimedia Commons/GNU Free Documentation License

CERN has confirmed that apparently a beech marten has caused “a short circuit in one of the electrical transformers [and] cut power to the LHC”.

And just because I heard the comment/joke twice already (sorry it’s in German, thx Basti) … das Tier war offensichtlich ein Selbstmarder :|