… and enjoy your holidays! Have a good time, lots of good food and gifts ;)
Things to do in Advent
In case you have some spare time during Advent, here’s two things to keep you busy and (possibly) make you smarter. Both the ‘MATHEON calendar‘ (mathematics) and the ‘Physics in Advent‘ calendar are available in English this year. There’s also a juniors math version called ‘Mathe im Advent‘, though it’s in German only.
Feel free to share their Facebook (#PhysicsInAdvent) and Twitter (@PhysicsInAdvent) pages/posts/tweets and help spread the word!
IPPOG
Just returned from my first IPPOG (International Particle Physics Outreach Group) meeting at CERN. Two and a half days of discussions and talks about outreach in particle physics, a visit to CERN IdeaSquare, and celebrating IPPOG’s (more or less) twentieth birthday.
IPPOG also just started a new EPS sponsored competition for school kids … send in your contributions until 7 January 2018!
Open Day & Fotohalbmarathon
Wow … what a weekend. After returning from the LHC LLP Workshop in Trieste at 7am on Saturday, I went straight to Garching to set up the scene for our 2017 Garching Open Day event starting at 11am. After getting home at 10pm I got started on the final preparations for Sunday’s 2017 Fotohalbmarathon. But one after the other …
Once again, and thanks to a great team, we had an exemplary Open Day event on Saturday … ATLAS live-info screens and posters, a button machine, a BYOPD competition, a large ATLAS LEGO model, short-film screenings throughout the day, a screening of “BBC Horizon – Inside CERN” in the evening, and several hundred people passing by (47 participants in the BYOPD competition) and chatting/discussing with us. The final QnA after the movie took longer than the movie itself :)
On Sunday I organised the ninth (my fifth) edition of our little version of a photo marathon, called Fotohalbmarathon. This year’s twelve topics followed the theme ‘Urban Globetrotter‘.
For both events the juries are still busy working out the best contributions ;)
Long-lived particles in Trieste
Just returned from our very nice workshop on ‘Searches for long-lived particles at the LHC‘ in Trieste. Three intense days of reports, discussions and new ideas related to searches for exotic long-lived particles at the LHC and beyond, and me having the pleasure to give the closing talk on Friday. Given the tight schedule there was unfortunately not much time to actually see Trieste, but here’s a few impressions …