W-elcome at the LHC

ATLAS just issues the latest release of its e-news, officially announcing the first W boson candidate events in the LHC … which of course reminds me of my nice little master thesis on the W mass measurement at ATLAS.

Below are illustrations of the two candidates: one W decaying into an electron (left) and one into a muon (right), of course both accompanied by the according neutrino, represented by missing energy (ETmiss) in the event.

MediaMe

Woooh … I just made it into the news on a local TV station (for three seconds about two minutes into the video, only in the background, though)! Here’s the video link. Great isn’t it …
Almost as cool as my interview with a local newspaper last week … though the quote is not actually mine, the experiment is called ATLAS and not Astra and Thomas is not my Professor and … well whatever!

Publication of the Month

On request I started posting additions to my publication-of-the-month list on this blog. Not that it wouldn’t be obvious when to expect a monthly contribution, but … you know … just the little reminder we sometimes need. Maybe even some feedback … who know!?

This month’s publication is about developments on automatic topic suggestion systems for blog authors. “Inspired by the Audience – A Topic Suggestion System for Blog Writers and Readers” by W. Geyer and C. Dugan from IBM, Cambridge, MA.

As usual this and all previous publications can be found in the publication of the month section of my website (and much easier if you log in).

Baaam! [Update]

Time has come! We finally saw the first events at 7 TeV centre of mass energy … more will come!
Here’s an event display of one of the first events recorded in ATLAS today.

[Update Mar 30th]Euphoria is slowly settling now, after the first successful LHC fill with collisions at 7 TeV has ended. The press has left Zeuthen already a while ago and the inauguration of our little control room ended with trays of empty champagne bottles … seems like a pretty successful day![Update]