The CMS guitar goes to Montreux

So the time has come to show the CMS guitar to some unexpecting people at the Montreux Jazz Festival this year. As part of "The Physics of Music and The Music of Physics" I will be delivering a small presentation about the Higgs boson discovery and the CMS guitar, together with Lily Asquith talking about the sound of the Higgs decay events and The Rock Doctor - Mark Lewney talking about the physics of rock guitar. We're also cooking up a wild guitar duo with Mark so this is promising to be a very fun event.

More details HERE.

Photo session again

The CMS guitar and I went for another photoshoot, with Daniel Lopez-Paullada. Here's a teaser shot:

More to come...

Symmetry Magazine

A very nice article on Famelab 2013 appeared today in the Symmetry Magazine, with a description of my performance with the CMS guitar. Check it out!
http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/march-2013/research-with-flair-at-famelab-2013

Second place in Famelab.ch Geneva round!

Last week I suddenly decided to take part in this year's edition of Famelab. The Swiss edition first round was held at CERN on Saturday (March 16th). So I had to quickly prepare a 3-minute presentation "explaining a science concept to general audience". Of course I couldn't have gone there without the CMS guitar, and in fact I based my talk on the idea of particle physics being like a jigsaw puzzle, an idea that I first showed in this blog some time ago.

photo: Tomasz Chrul

I ended up taking the second place, the winner was Divya Ail with a very entertaining talk about... Viagra, among other things. A small personal victory was having John Ellis himself tell me that he liked my open-ended puzzle analogy and that he "shall steal it for his next public lecture".

photo: Tomasz Chrul

Anyway second place means that I'm still in the game -  now I have to prepare something for the Swiss Finals in May. Hmm....

Heaven on their Minds

My first studio production with the CMS guitar is out! This is my version of the classic opening song of Jesus Christ Superstar - "Heaven on their Minds". I sing and play all the instruments (except the drums which I programmed). I also did all the video and audio production. Hope you like it!

You can also listen and download high quality audio from SoundCloud. (Free of course)

The CMS guitar appears for the first guitar solo, around the 3:00 mark. Playing fretless is more and more fun!

Upcoming videos

The CMS guitar will have a guest appearance (for one solo) in my upcoming cover of "Heaven on Their Minds" from Jesus Christ Superstar. Here's a shot from the video:

UPDATE: the video is out, see here.

I have another music video project in the making that will feature her more prominently, I will focus on that when this one is released.

"Introducing the CMS Guitar" photo session

I did a photo session at "LHC Point 5" where the CMS detector is located 100m underground. The area with the detector itself is not accessible due to ongoing collisions, but we also have a great 1:1 scale photo of the experiment there, which you can see in the photos below.

Go to this gallery on flickr to see the full set. All photos by Julia Hoffman.