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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Besides that Francis is a really nice person too (and arguably the only experiment spokesperson who has never been to the experiment, something he likes to joke about) www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physi...

nobelprize.org

Nobel Prize in Physics 2026

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2026 was awarded to Francis Halzen “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.”

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Halzen's idea of using the ice in glaciers (on the South Pole ) to study neutrinos was really groundbreaking.

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

These detectors use ice to detect some of the most difficult particles to see, neutrinos, and use those neutrinos for particle physics (study the neutrinos) and astronomy (use the neutrinos to study stars/galaxies/the universe).

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

The #NobelPrize for physics goes this year to Francis Halzen, who has been the visionary that created first the Amanda and then the IceCube experiments.

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Fresh off the press: next year there will be another CERN open day: 24, 25 and 26 September 2027 ! (pic: a group I took to visit the CMS detector at one of the collision points of the large hadron collider. For CMS visits, guides have a white helmet, visitors in orange, or sometimes blue)

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Reposted by Freya Blekman

CMS Experiment at CERN @cmsexperiment.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Tae-Jeong Kim has joined Florencia Canelli as Deputy Spokesperson, working with Anadi Canepa as Spokesperon for the CMS Collaboration for 2026-2028. The collaboration thanks outgoing Deputy Spokesperson, Hafeez Hoorani, for representing CMS from 2024-2026. Learn more: cms.cern/index.php/ne...

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

This week I'm in sunny Graz in Austria, speaking about Higgs bosons and why we need a future collider to measure them properly, presenting a so-called mini-colloquium . It's at the 75th Annual Meeting of the Austrian Physical Society, good times will be had. I've never been to #Graz, any tips?

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Excellent science communication by our summer students www.instagram.com/reel/DdTH7ra...

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Don’t worry it’s on display outside, and hasn’t been used for 40+ years

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Yep I know the band. Named after the awesome science gear

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

So many historic science objects on our campus in #hamburg This time: a van de Graaff generator! #hamburg #wisskomm #particlephysics #accelerator #science

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

My colleague Anna Benecke is hiring a PhD student in the context starting her DESY group. More details here: inspirehep.net/jobs/3195484

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Because he (in the choir) will be signing the standard model Lagrangean

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

If you are in the Hamburg area: My colleagues Christian Schwanenberger and Beate Heinemann are taking part in this interesting #STEAM event: ndkh.de/kirchen/?chu...

poster of Gloria Bruni's opera "Schöpfung Fragmente"

Panel discussion titled "Glaube trifft Wissenschaft" with speakers Prof. Dr. Beate Heinemann, Prof. Bazon Brock, and composer Gloria Bruni; Saturday, 12 September at 19:00, Blankeneser Kirche am Markt, shown on a maroon event poster.

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Some exciting #darkmatter #physics news from a mine in South Dakota. But no Nobel prizes any time soon. I explain why in this a bit longer explanation video

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Conferences are an important part of the academic calendar, it is where we discuss the latest and greatest, and where we make strategy for the future. Here is a short video about the #ICHEP2026 conference, that a few of my colleagues and I attended last month www.instagram.com/reel/DcvuZso...

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Every layer of a Dolly Parton outfit had a job: structure, sparkle, warmth, all of it in service of the show. Particle detectors are built the same way, layer after layer, each tuned for a different job, working together to catch what matters. Thank you #DollyParton for the sparkle and the song

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

The @thedailyshow.com had a great episode about that, with John Oliver giving one of the best statistics lessons there are youtu.be/lalvQQoFvBA?...

youtu.be

The Wagner Principle

YouTube video by Paolo (in A'dam)

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

I am a scientist working at CERN. If you have questions, I can answer them. Honestly. But beware, I will also call 🐄 💩 (and why)

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

It also offers a way to distinguish an ALP near the tt̄ threshold from toponium, since an ALP shows up in both tt̄ and four-top final states while toponium does not. And HEPData by new PhD student Saurav Bania, who did a stellar job joining the team mid-review.

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

This result probes a mass range that neither tt̄ resonance searches nor missing-momentum searches cover, and could only work because of expertise by Dominic Stafford and theory colleagues from the Cluster of Excellence Quantum Universe.

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

The search is sensitive to vector, scalar and pseudoscalar mediators. The most forward-looking piece: the first reinterpretation of a four-top search in terms of axion-like particles coupling to top quarks (we didn’t see any but those would also not likely be visible now in many likely scenarios).

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

A new final state. This is the first dedicated search of its kind requiring two leptons. Cleaner signature, and complementary to the single-lepton searches that came before. Run 3 data. Besides Run 2 data of course, and important when looking for something this rare. the first for this signature.

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

A machine-learning top tagger, designed by Gabriele Milella. An algorithm identifies which of those jets genuinely contain a hadronically decaying top, much better than the previous selection-based approach at the same misidentification rate. Exactly the gain the low-mass region needed.

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Variable-radius jets. Using a p_T-dependent distance parameter, we reconstruct the mediator mass from a pair of jets from 500 GeV to 4 TeV. This opens up the region below 1 TeV, and uses a great DESY / University of Hamburg algorithm designed by my colleague Roman Kogler (et al).

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

The obstacle has always been experimental, and the fact that this signature is super rare, so we can only probe it now with the huge datasets we have available. What is new, and took loads of #datascience #algorithmic work

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

We look for undiscovered hypothetical particles that couple only to top quarks, because this is one of the few places new physics can still very comfortably hide at the LHC. Four-top-quark events are among the most direct ways to probe that.

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Ambitious #science and definitely particle physics are almost always a #team effort. This is also true for conferences. Here you see Pedro (Portugal), Azwinndini (South Africa), Kate (UK), Sandra (Brazil), and friends, together we presently are organising a track at the #ichep2026 conference

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

A connection of mine is editing a book on Science and Sustainability. They need more data on views by early career scientists so made a survey. In case you are an ecr and this interests you, please complete the survey at forms.gle/K5AJSbuCsKdR... #sustainability #science #earlycareerscientists

forms.gle

Sustainability research

Survey of Attitudes and Commitments. The purpose of this survey is to gauge public perception of sustainable development concepts.

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

This week I’m at a conference. Physics conferences have of course talks about physics, but about much more! For example this morning, I gave a talk about how we run our group Instagram account (and why we do it that way) #ichep2026 particle physics is #openscience so talk is here: indi.to/vjPHb

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

This time in random gear I found on campus: the monochromator You’ve probably seen a prism split light into a rainbow. X-rays can be split the same way with a crystal monochromator instead of glass. The antique monochromator in this video is a real piece of that history.

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Very important work that falls between instrumentation and analysis is what often makes the difference in physics reach 🔥 keep up the good work Kuan!

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

There are 2 postdoctoral positions opening in the CMS group at DESY, more details here: lnkd.in/evBjrzkt (yes they are in my group) Please don't hesitate to forward this job announcement to suitable candidates.

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Very nice scicomm of one of the recent papers in my group. We checked how the interplay between different collisions energies at future colliders (and which energy/amount of data is best) can help to find, or constrain, axion-like particles.

instagram.com

Particle physics by CMS experiment at DESY (@cmsatdesy) • Instagram photos and videos

67 likes, 3 comments - cmsatdesy on June 23, 2026: "What if a new particle showed up as three photons? Axion-like particles, or ALPs, are hypothetical particles that appear in many extensions of the Standard...

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

And quite a lot of nice UHH results there!

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

This really nice result has a link to Germany and DESY: one of the leading authors (Sapta Bhattacharya, now professor on ATLAS, in the USA) did this work as a #HumboldtResearchFellow in our group

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Whoo hoo our team (team “lucky number 13”) made it into the photo collage 😎

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Whoo hoo our team (team “lucky number 13”) made it into the photo collage 😎

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Wondering what that formula is? That is the formula of the standard model, so the formula that describes everything we know about fundamental particles. See for example here for a short tour www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-...

symmetrymagazine.org

The deconstructed Standard Model equation

The Standard Model is far more than elementary particles arranged in a table.

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

We are celebrating the renewal of our #hamburg #clusterofexcellence #quantumuniverse. With science. And art! And singing physicists !

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Freya Blekman @freyablekman.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

(And it’s different circles that complain than last times as well. Maybe that should be the real fingerpointing)

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