CMS measures production rates up to high transverse momenta A decade after its unexpected discovery, the properties of the X(3872) exotic resonance are still under intense scrutiny. This state was first seen in 2003 by the Belle experiment and then…

Sometimes, everyday words are co-opted by scientists and used as technical terms. One of these is the word “berry”. Talking to a botanist friend of mine, I learned that tomatoes are berries, but strawberries are not — the scientific meaning of a…

Following the results presented at the electroweak session of the annual winter conference, Rencontres de Moriond, CMS has now presented many new results for this week’s quantum chromodynamics (QCD) session. The results include many searches for new…

CMS is presenting a wide range of results for the annual winter conference, Rencontres de Moriond. The first week of Moriond — 3–8 March — is devoted primarily to electroweak (EW) studies. Among the CMS results are further studies of the recently…

The new year brings a new type of collision at the LHC: the accelerator will smash protons and lead nuclei together, allowing CMS and the other LHC experiments to study the cold nuclear matter we expect these collisions to produce. Although we…

In 2011, CMS presented early evidence that Upsilon (Υ) particles produced in lead-lead collisions “melt” as a consequence of interacting with the hot nuclear matter created in these heavy-ion interactions. CMS has since updated and extended this…

In the vast particle landscape, there are, to borrow a phrase, known knowns (the Standard Model, for example), unknown unknowns (exotic extensions of the Standard Model and beyond), and those ever-interesting known unknowns. A recent CMS observation…

At the Hadron Collider Physics (HCP) Symposium held in Kyoto, Japan on 12–16 November 2012, CMS presented many new results, including updates on the search for the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson as well as Supersymmetry (SUSY). Several of these…

Amongst all known elementary particles, the top quark is peculiar: weighing as much as a Tungsten atom, it completes the so-called 3rd generation of quarks and is the only quark whose properties can be directly measured. Owing to its mass, the top…

Recommendations for luminosity estimations for HCP are available on the main LUM POG page.

CMS has published its first paper on proton-lead (pPb) collisions, describing the observation of a phenomenon that was previously seen first in nucleus-nucleus collisions but also detected by CMS in proton-proton (pp) collisions. The effect is a…

All of the atoms in our bodies are made of electrons, protons and neutrons, and the protons and neutrons can be further broken down into quarks. Fundamentally, then, we are made of only two types of particles: electrons and quarks. But what do these…