Experimental evidence from the last half-century has established the standard model as a foundational theory of particle physics. Still, it is clear that the standard model is not the final theory. There are many open questions: Is the mass of Higgs…

The Standard Model of the fundamental particles describes the W and Z bosons as the mediator particles of the weak force, one of the four known fundamental forces responsible for the phenomenon of radioactivity and an essential ingredient to our Sun…

Around the one-year anniversary of the first COVID-19 lockdown in Switzerland, physicists and engineers working on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment closed the case on an elusive problem affecting the operation of the Hadron Calorimeter (…

Since the LHC first began colliding protons over ten years ago, CMS physicists have hoped to find evidence for one of the most popular and expansive theories of New Physics -- Supersymmetry.   The key idea of Supersymmetry (or “SUSY”) is…

The term 'flavor' was introduced by Murray Gell-Mann and his student Harald Fritzsch to describe the different types of quarks known at the time – up, down, and strange – the list of quark flavors grew to six. The term is adapted for the lepton…

  Are there more fundamental particles than the ones we currently know? Do we live in a Universe with additional spatial dimensions? These hypotheses are among the many ideas that have been suggested to explain how to unify the electroweak and…

The CMS Collaboration has released the results of a new analysis that looks for the subtle influence of “new physics” in the production of a W boson and photon pair.    The standard model of particle physics is an incredibly successful…

High energy heavy-ion collisions provide a unique opportunity to study one of the four forces of nature, the strong force, under extreme conditions. A new result from the CMS experiment shapes our understanding of the strong interaction and further…

Electromagnetic interactions govern everyday life: You see an object when particles of light deposit energy on the retinas in your eyes. Our sense of touch results from the exchange of the same particles, the photons, between the atoms in our skin…

In the Standard Model of particle physics, at least one Higgs boson is needed to explain fundamental particles’ masses. There is, however, no reason why there needs to be exactly one. On the contrary, many theories of physics beyond the Standard…

The standard model of particle physics encapsulates our current knowledge of elementary particles and their interactions. The standard model is not complete; for example, it does not describe observations such as gravity, has no prediction for dark…

Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is the part of the Standard Model of Particle Physics that describes the strong interaction. At relatively low energies, the Constituent Quark Model is a phenomenologically successful effective method to describe…