Interview with Johannes Brantl on a model of the Munich Compact Light Source

"Just do it, it's fun!"

During a visit to the Garching ESO Supernova Planetarium and Visitor Center I was fascinated by the model they have there of the European Extremely Large Telescope. As a result, I also wanted to construct a scientific machine. Since I didn't have the fitting bricks at home, I first searched for a software to design the model virtually.

A little over 500 hours. And another 200 hours for the instructions, which cover almost 5,600 assembly steps. I finished the virtual model shortly before the lockdown in the spring of 2020.

Rendering the virtual model yielded beautiful and realistic images. Now I could share these pictures with other people instead of just telling them about the project. And I was very happy about the positive feedback.

Many of my colleagues really wanted to be there and help with the building process. So, I created the instructions and ordered the bricks for the physical model. It took many evenings with plenty of pizza breaks before we had assembled the model. In total, construction took up about 213 work hours.

Oh, I was always motivated: I felt completely within my element. We usually started at around 5:30 pm, built for two hours, ordered something to eat and then went on building afterwards, sometimes almost until midnight. 213 hours may sound like a lot, but those hours were distributed among many people and several evenings. A team 18 colleagues from the Chair contributed to the project.

Yes, ever since I was little. The first models were relatively simple. One of the first real Lego models I ever made, when I was four years old, was a police truck. I was very proud of it at the time. At some point I started to build Star Wars models as well. Whenever I had an idea, I tried it out with all the building bricks I had and then refined it. Once the structural core was finished and the shape looked about right, I added the decorative elements.

The MuCLS is like a miniaturized synchrotron, a machine which generates X-ray radiation. Most synchrotrons have giant storage rings a couple of hundred meters in circumference. At the MuCLS this has been reduced to a couple of meters. As a result, the device is significantly more compact, but still generates X-rays with properties similar to those produced at synchrotrons. The maximum energy of the electrons in the storage ring is however considerably lower in the MuCLS than in a large synchrotron.

One doctoral candidate investigated how particles with sizes in the order of micrometers are transported out of the lungs. She used phase-contrast imaging to track the movement of the particles within the respiratory system.

Another example is the investigation of catalysts. Our research group used X-ray absorption spectroscopy to analyze a palladium catalyst to learn more about the electronic and geometrical structures.

First, I built another, smaller version of the model with about 3,000 pieces. Based on that I then built an even smaller version. The smallest version has the size of a sheet of DIN A4 notebook paper and consists of less than 1,000 pieces. In the future, more scientific setups might follow as models.

Just do it, it's fun!