Now the travel in reverse: Hamburg - Köln - Brussels - home. Hopefully a better experience this time... The start is good: we left in time from Hamburg hbf.

Again today, the DESY Theory where I'm at had some amazing talks. The first one was claiming the strong CP problem doesn't exist, there is no theta term. I can't repeat the argument, it was deeply theoretical. But just imagine the standard lore was incomplete, and wrong. All axion searches useless?

I just had a tour around the DESY labs where parts of the next trackers (ATLAS and CMS) are being constructed. Amazing setups and professionalism 🤩 Every picture has an enormous amount detail behind it. Super nice to see it in real life (thanks to Elisabetta and Doris 🙏).

Today on the arXiv: "there is no 690GeV resonance". A short rebuff, ending with a sarcastic: "A Nobel prize is sure to follow."

Nu al zit alles op z'n tandvlees. Al jaren loopt financiering achter op de groei. Dit is besparen op de kwaliteit van het onderwijs en dus toekomst van onze jeugd. Misschien moet het hoger onderwijs ook staken. "Dit is onmogelijk" is de juiste reactie, Jan.

This week I'm at the DESY theory workshop "synergies towards the future standard model", talking on LHC measurements and HL-LHC prospects. Last time I was here was 24y ago 😱 for the SUSY conference. My talk may not be as inspiring though as Ed Witten's I saw back then as a just started PhD student.

On my way to Hamburg to the DESY theory workshop. This time by train, I have the time for the long journey. First stop Liège, next Köln. Hoping for a smooth connection, but at least this train is in time!

Het nieuwe orkestseizoen start op, en wat een plezier om mijn viool terug vast te pakken na een jaartje buitenlands stof vergaren. Zen - mentale rust. wat een achteraf-besef-je-het-pas cadeau dat ik dat als kind heb kunnen leren.

This is the thread I needed today. What an actor, what a man.

Neon lights up the LHC! CMS scientists study the first-ever neon-neon collisions, and comparing to oxygen-oxygen, xenon-xenon, and lead-lead, find interesting insights into quark-gluon plasma – the hottest state of matter🌡️ 📍Read more: cms.cern/news/lhcs-fi...

Give a physicist some data and look what he does 😅

Interesting new ideas to solve the hierarchy problem. With very testable predictions, in particular lamda3 being 3 times SM value, which will be tested well before HL-LHC concludes.

🧵Soumya Dansana, joint ULB-VUB PhD at the IIHE, explains is latest thesis results in a CMS physics briefing article : "Hunting exotic H bosons decaying to lighweight scalar particles" 1/4

Finally, a close-up of Comet 3l/ATLAS that makes sense! HL-LHC upgrades for the @atlasexperiment.bsky.social are on the way! #physics #astronomy

Today the Belgian high energy physics community gathers in Brussels for a day of review with the RECFA panel, the European committee for future accelerators. Exciting to take stock of past achievements and future opportunities.

Appesapppp!!! Van onze eigen appelen natuurlijk 😋

Ik kan niet bevestigen hoeveel, maar dat we met zeer veel waren mooie duidelijk wezen.

Doctoraatsverdediging in Louvain-la-Neuve, altijd een tikje surreeel.

This is an analysis led by my PhD student Soumya Dansana. Beautiful work! We achieved unique sensitivity in some phase space areas, and designed the search to have a very nice transition between results for prompt and displaces signatures. Proud! 🤩

Nails it.

The ULB JUNO group is delighted to share an important milestone for JUNO, the world’s largest underground neutrino detector. After ten years of design and construction, the JUNO experiment started data taking on 26/08/25, with the central detector fully filled with 20K tonnes of liquid scintillator.

Het probleem is er, al lang, dus laat maar komen die wisselmeerderheid.

Today, I'm off to #CERN for something that gets even me excited and slightly nervous: I'll be giving the status report of our #CMS experiment to the LHCC review panel. Covering everything from recent physics results, detector and data taking operations, to progress on the upgrades. Wish me luck!

Hahahahaha aaaa ... ik dacht het niet Linkedin

Un lien entre le néolibéralisme et la montée mondiale de l'extrême-droite? Je ne connais pas le nom de cet orateur, mais j'ai rarement entendu une analyse aussi limpide de ce qui arrive à l'humanité du 21ème siècle. Belle matière à réflexion.

Traveling back from #TAUP2025 XIC->PEK->MXP->BRU First hailed a taxi on the street: dirt cheap. Half hour drive was 7 EUR.

Op 15 juni trokken 110.000 mensen de rode lijn voor Gaza. Maar politici nemen nog steeds geen échte sancties. De genocide gaat door, de medeplichtigheid ook. Op 7 september komen we nog groter en luider terug in Brussel. We trekken opnieuw de rode lijn en tonen de rode kaart aan onze politici. ✊🟥

#TAUP2025 conference restarts. This morning, it's dark matter time! And I'll represent ATLAS and CMS with a plenary talk on DM searches at colliders. Large audience, even a nobel laureate - let's have fun 😀

Next week, the LHC will do a test with very high bunch charge, at high luminosity conditions. In the plans from our run coordination: _average_ PU ~ 132 😱 Note: the LHC design was a PU of ~ 25

Yesterday's outing to the Jinping underground laboratory (deepest! largest!) was concluded with a visit to the Jinping-I dam (highest!). Impressive^2! Note the #CMS t-shirt 😁

Opinion: eSIMs are the best invention for international travel since the power adapter send tweet

Off to the TAUP conference on dark matter and other topics, reviewing collider searches. I'm particularly looking forward to the visit of the Jinping underground lab where the PandaX experiment is hosted!

I have to take exams of 3 students this second session, which has started this week. One student asked earlier this week to have an exam outside of the regular exam time. Another student had forgotten to schedule the exam. Gen-Z ftw? 🥴

I don't know what triggers it, but I always immediately notice when "amount" and "number" are being confused. It's simple though: if you can count it, it's a number of things; if you can't, it's an amount.

No time to fall asleep! While on night shift at the #CMS experiment, I had to wake up quite some people to deal with a never-happened-before problem with one of our subsystems. After a few hours of zoom calls and debugging, the experts got a temporary fix in, and all taken data was confirmed safe!

My weekly group meeting is starting and someone has put a link on the agenda to a video of Anakin killing the Jedi younglings ?! Will be an interesting meeting, I imagine...

That feeling when you're looking up something in a paper you wrote in the past, and you realize you have two distinct citations of the same paper. Oh no! My illusion of perfection is shattered!

This is one to keep an eye on... It is a followup of this paper I had the pleasure to review in CMS internally a couple of years ago: arxiv.org/abs/2206.09997

The shell and yoke structure of one of the new superconducting magnets being assembled @berkeleylab.lbl.gov for the HL-LHC at CERN. Once installed, these will be the first niobium-tin-based magnets ever used in a particle accelerator and will increase the LHC’s luminosity by a factor of ten.

I'm preparing my move back from #CERN to Belgium next week - the past year flew by at incredible speed. It has been one of my most intense years to far - many reasons - but what an amazing opportunity and what great things accomplished in that year. I'm very very grateful...

Today holidays started. Total zen.

A few years ago, I saw a talk from Omar Yaghi on this topic of MOFs. Fantastic talk. It was about water capture then, amazing possibilities. Here I also read on CO2 capture, hydrogen storage,... My chemist colleague says it's just a matter of (little) time for his Nobel to be awarded.

13 years ago, I witnessed my then-boss co-announce the discovery of the #HiggsBoson. We had stayed up all night to secure a seat in the way-too-small CERN main auditorium; totally worth it! We've come a long way since then, but still have so much to learn! #ilovemyjob

Onze Nobelprijswinnaar is zijn nationaliteit kwijt. Ongekend hoe je met je wetenschappelijke toppers omgaat. www.volkskrant.nl/buitenland/n...

One of these days of depressing disappointment. 2 postdocs and 3 students applying for personal grants this year - none invited to interview in the second round. These are great people with nice projects, who don't get a chance to defend themselves in person. Frustration frustration.

"Het experiment van na WO II heeft tachtig jaar hoop verschaft, maar is nu definitief mislukt. De wetten van de jungle hebben gezegevierd." - Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer www.demorgen.be/nieuws/ziehi...

Ik heb dat al heel mijn leven. En vroeger was er geen "ik zal een email of een berichtje sturen." Deal with it zeker?

Arrived! See you tomorrow! #ESPPU

Congratulations to the CMS Spokesperson Gautier Hamel de Monchenault on his appointment as the Director for Research and Computing at CERN, effective January 1, 2026! 👏 Nominated by Mark Thomson and approved by the CERN Council, Gautier will bring a wealth of experience to this position.