While the work on improvements on the detector continues during the Long Shutdown 2, physicists are starting to reap the rewards of the LHC dataset collected in LHC Run 2. The dataset is the largest sample ever collected at a collider and equivalent…

Since the discoveries of the third generation of quarks and leptons starting in the 1970s, physicists have asked the natural question "Can there be more generations?".  One of the first key results from the Large Electron Positron collider LEP…

Over the past century, physicists have developed a theory governing the fundamental interactions of elementary particles, known as the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Thus far, it has stood up to many experimental tests with an extraordinary…

The Standard Model of particle physics asserts that the Higgs boson generates the mass of all fundamental particles. In 2012 a new particle was discovered at the CERN LHC that behaves closely like the Higgs particle predicted by the Standard Model.…

After the discovery of the Higgs boson, CMS observed its interaction with some standard model particles like the bottom and top quark, the tau lepton, and the W and Z boson.  Measuring the strength of interactions with quarks and leptons (…

How long do fundamental particles live? In the Standard Model, we know particles can have many different lifetimes; from the top quark which decays in less than a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, to stable particles like the…

The High-Luminosity LHC is a major upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider that is expected to increase the luminosity by a factor of 10 beyond the design luminosity of the current LHC. This means, the data produced per year will be equal to the amount…

In February, the CMS and MoEDAL collaborations at CERN signed an agreement to hand over to MoEDAL a section of the LHC beam pipe that was located inside CMS between 2008 and 2013. The delicate object, 6 metres long and made of beryllium, will now be…

Suppose that you need to see what is inside a small room that is difficult to access. Thick walls between you and the object of your investigation; you cannot dig, and the closest that you can get to the target is inside a narrow tunnel, with no…

In November 2018 the proton-proton running of the LHC Run 2 ended. The data collected in 2018 is the largest sample ever collected at the LHC. Just under three months after the final proton proton collisions were recorded, the CMS collaboration…

The CMS detector is built from several different layers, surrounding the beam pipe in which the LHC beams collide. The subdetector that is closest to the collisions is the pixel detector. It has a functionality similar to a digital camera taking 40…

After the LHC was shut down at the end of 2018, one might think that physicists working in the large experiments can sit back and relax. On the contrary, CMS will undergo an intensive upgrade and maintenance program during the two-year long…