The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been providing particle collisions at larger and larger luminosities over the years, thanks to a series of upgrades. However, the most anticipated upgrade has yet to come: the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC). Here…

The focus of Run Coordination during Long Shutdown 2 (LS2) is to organize regular detector-commissioning periods which help to closely monitor the advance of maintenance and upgrade activities, to smooth interactions between subsystems. This ensures…

After long months of preparations, the Beam Radiation, Instrumentation, and Luminosity (BRIL) group has completed the installation of three instruments dedicated to the measurement of luminosity and beam conditions: the Beam Condition Monitor “Fast…

After more than two years with lots of delicate work the Pixel Tracker has been successfully installed at the centre of the CMS detector and it is now ready for commissioning. The Pixel Tracker is the CMS sub-detector closest to the interaction…

Reaching another major milestone of the Long shutdown 2 and performing the biggest upgrade of the experimental beam vacuum system since the first operation of CMS in 2008. After several years of complex design, manufacture and planning, the CMS…

As for any other instrument, the CMS experiment needs a “quiet” environment to take data, with the lowest level of background noise. In the CMS detector, background noise is mainly due to energetic particles generated at high eta (i.e. close to the…

Despite the rather challenging circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, the CMS GEM (Gas Electron Multiplier) team has been working against all odds to complete the installation of the very first GEM station (GE1/1) in CMS. With the completion of one…

Since late May, with the incremental re-opening of CERN’s facilities, members of the CMS GEM project have been hard at work restarting the laboratory activities in preparation for the continued efforts towards the GE1/1 chambers installation. Made…

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Muon System is undergoing major upgrades during Long Shutdown 2 (LS2), preparing for the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC). The Large Hadron Collider will be upgraded to significantly increase the luminosity (frequency of…

The CMS magnet, one of the largest superconducting magnets in the world, with the largest stored energy, has been warmed up in April-May 2020 in order to perform an intervention on the vacuum pumping system. The magnet is a 220-ton cylinder cooled…

During the early months of 2020, as the COVID-19 threat increased, CMS activity was adapted to gradually transfer responsibility to locally resident collaborators. LS2 work was accelerated in the experimental hall, so as to reach a critical LS2…

When the LHC is sending billions of protons at each other millions of times per second, it’s important to know just how many of them actually are colliding, both so that the LHC can optimize its operations to produce the most collisions possible,…