Category Archives: Physics

Education and Validation

Yesterday I spent about eight hours in my first CERN Guide Course to learn how to better understand, respond and deal with visitors.
We ended up doing little presentations of ourselfes/CERN/the itineraries at CERN in front of the others, the expert (being flown in from Paris) and the camera … yeah, and afterwards everyone would watch it again and analyse the whole thing.
But it turned out to be quite useful to get this kind of feedback …
Id addition we had couple of exercises on how to ask the right questions (which would uncovering instead of influencing questions !?!) …
Yeah … quite educative and also quite entertaining after all …
On Monday I will have my second (and for now last course) getting to know all the itineraries myself …

After that I just went to the ATLAS Control Room to see if anything was going on. Since I got all my shifts canceled this week I felt like I have to catch up a little …
So I was enjoying my first datataking of cosmic events … (which is actually not too exciting in itself) … but I had two of the experts around … so again this was another quite educative four and a half hours … which in the end seemingly brought my DCS Shift Validation … which makes me a Pixel Detector shifter now if everything is confirmed ;)

Talks, Cooling Problems, Köttbullar and Cooling Problems

This is obviously not my week (and also not ATLAS’ week) … ohh man!
I spend my weekend almost exclusively on preparing a talk for Monday … and finally still didn’t manage to put in much new stuff. Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning went into preparing a talk for Tuesday (which went much better). And then the whole sadness started … on Tuesday my DCS validation shift was canceled due to some cooling problem and today my DAQ observer shift was canceled due to another cooling problem … ohh man!
Ahh and Köttbullar … right, that was, besides watching Wall-E, one of the few highlights … having nice dinner at Jenny’s … hmm.

First Pixel DCS Shift [Update]

Today I am having/had my first Pixel DCS (Detector Control System) Observer shift in the ATLAS Control Room.
Watching the baby from 15h to 23h … not much happening though!

In case you wanna be part of it … here you go! Live Webcams!
I am sitting in the front left arc in both pictures …

[Update]
It actually turned out to be two shifts in a row from 15h to ~7h … it got a bit more interesting at about midnight and when I finally managed to remind myself of the bus schedule I notice that the last one left already … voila, I stayed until the bus ran again and enjoyed the night shift, which was eventually more educative than my actual training shift …

What a weekend!!!

This weekend I was back in the city of Berlin … and the weekend was BIG and exhausting!
I started out as black hole on Friday’s Halloween Party, continued as a guide talking about the LHC and stuff for about 5h at the Weltmaschine exhibition on Saturday (after just 4h30min of sleep), watched the new Coen Brothers movie “Burn After Reading” (which was amusing as usual) and had some very nice ‘price on request’ filet steak at Escados Berlin (hmmm tasty).
On Sunday I restarted with another 5h of talking about the LHC at the exhibition and had another nice dinner …

Thinking about changing the field …X-rays from Sticky Tape

Ever heard about X-rays from sticky tape … never!?
There you go … its a new field! Still there has been a publication in Nature about exactly this subject.
Some of you might have seen light being emitted when pulling sticky tape, but these physicist could show that there is quite some X-rays comming out of these little bastards …
For everyone interested heres the publication:
“Correlation between nanosecond X-ray flashes and stick–slip friction in peeling tape”, Carlos G. Camara et al.; Nature, Vol. 455, S. 1089 (I cannot put a link due to copyright reasons)
There is a video showing the whole thing though!