After roughly a year of internal reviewing the ATLAS publication committee and the ATLAS spokesperson have finally approved the paper I was, amoung others, working on during my master thesis.
The “Re-evaluation of the LHC potential for the measurement of mW” can now be found in SPIRES and hep-ex arXiv and has been submitted to The European Physical Journal C.

On April 29th Angela Merkel, the current German chancellor, visited ATLAS/CERN. The picture shows Rolf Heuer (the designated Director-General), Robert Aymar (the current Director-General), who knows, Angela Merkel and Peter Jenny (the ATLAS spokesman) in the ATLAS Control Room.
Since Mrs. Merkel is a graduated physicist it was actually about time for her to visit.
Especially since the public underground access is closing next week. From than on only a few people are allowed to go down and only after iris scan based authentification (cool but unfortunately needed due to French laws applying at the LHC).

Theres also an entry in Mrs. Merkel’s travelbook, see it here (but only in German, so far).

Just got an email that I was selected to be part of the 2008 CERN-Fermilab HCPSS this summer.
From August 12th to 22nd I am going to be at Fermilab near Chicago!
Yeeeeehaa!

This weekend was probably the last chance for the public to see the LHC and all its experiments.
I took part in quite a few visits (ATLAS, LHC, ALICE, CMS, LHCb, LHC control room, see pictures and my gallery) on Saturday (which was open only for CERN members and their families) and did about 7 tours (of one hour each) of the ATLAS detector on Sunday.

It has been a tremendous success and CERN managed to allow underground visits for a stunning number of 11.000 people on Saturday and 20.000 people on Sunday. The total number of visitor was estimated to be 23.000 on Saturday and 53.000 on Sunday.

ATLAS itself managed bring down about 2.200 visitors on Saturday and 3.500 visitors on Sunday. With tours starting roughly every 15 minutes we still had people waiting for about 4 hours to get to see the experiment.

I think, besides minor details, it has been a great success and I had a lot of fun showing people around and explaining them the LHC, ATLAS and many other things, even though I was completely wasted after about 9 hours of guiding (about 7 tours) and cleaning up and so forth.

I love that shit ;-)