Almost forgot the Higgs thingy …

CERN, Physics

Ahh right … there was a big presentation this Tuesday at CERN.

Both ATLAS and CMS presented their latest and greatest on the Higgs hunt. And … after all the excitement before, I have to admit that I was slightly disappointed by the results. Sure they excluded a lot and yes they found some hints, but still everything is far from significant and there have been many examples of such discrepancies before … all disappearing after all. Actually ATLAS claimed to have fully excluded one of these previous effects. Well, I guess Rolf Heuer’s final words summarised the whole thing quite well … nothing definitely seem, nothing definitely excluded, let’s wait for next year’s data!

Experimental limits from ATLAS on Standard Model Higgs production in the mass range 110-150 GeV. The solid curve reflects the observed experimental limits for the production of Higgs of each possible mass value (horizontal axis). The region for which the solid curve dips below the horizontal line at the value of 1 is excluded with a 95% confidence level (CL). The dashed curve shows the expected limit in the absence of the Higgs boson, based on simulations. The green and yellow bands correspond (respectively) to 68%, and 95% confidence level regions from the expected limits.

Here you can find an explanation on what this image is actually showing.

More on slammed science

Berlin, CERN, DESY, Outreach

Just got an email with the links to the first Youtube videos from the Weltmaschine Science Slam in November.
Be aware that all is in German.

1. “Schwarze Löcher am LHC Teilchenbeschleuniger” (Sofie Wolf)
2. “Das ATLAS-Experiment” (me)
3. “Dark Matter: Kleine Teilchen, dunkle Massen” (Eike Middell)

?. “Die Naturgesetz-Maschine – Das Noether-Theorem” (Ulrik Günther)
?. “Von Flaschen, Mücken und UFOs – Der LHC-Teilchenbeschleuniger” (Clemens Lange)
?. “Zufall, Zonk und Z-Boson – Wahrscheinlichkeit und Monte-Carlo-Simulationen” (Martin Mamach)

Slam time [update]

Berlin, CERN, DESY, Outreach

Today is slam time in Berlin … my first one … quite excited!
19h00 at Urania Berlin (link).

Back from the slam … second of six :) … it was an interesting and entertaining night, though I didn’t see much as I had to wait outside for all others to finish before me … anyways, there might be another slam coming up some time next year …

Apparently there will be recordings of the event on youtube at some point … I’ll keep you updated!

GeoCaching in Copenhagen

Copenhagen, GeoCaching

You’ve probably heard of geo caching before … so did I, but never really cared. But after my parents got pretty excited about it last week and we had two good friends and passionate geo cachers as visitors for the weekend (greetz L&M), we decided to combine our little Copenhagen tourist tour with a little geo hunt :)

After discovering seven caches on Saturday, it seems it caught me and I finally registered on Sunday to join the hunt …
It seems like a nice thing to do to see place you otherwise might end up going … we’ll see.

Only the pricing model of GeoCaching.com is something I did and still do not really fancy!
With only the basic and free account you simply cannot do much :( Also the Android app costs about seven euros.

Fortunately there is c:geo for Android which is free and my choice for now … though it has some troubles in the offline mode that I haven’t figured out yet.

Here’s my currently not so impressive stats:

Profile for SaMeCache