There is copious astrophysical and cosmological evidence for dark matter, but no indication of how it was produced, how it interacts with regular matter, or how it could fit into an inclusive model of particle physics. One possibility is that dark…
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 (called…
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…
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 has…
The top quark is the heaviest particle in the standard model, and since its discovery in 1995 at the Tevatron collider at Fermilab, its study has become prominent in furthering our understanding of fundamental physics. At the Large Hadron Collider,…
The recent results from the Muon g-2 Collaboration have added to the growing tension between the measured and predicted values of the muon’s magnetic moment. The equivalent measurement of this property for the electron is a cornerstone of quantum…
New in! CMS physicists search for heavy cousins of the neutrino in beauty meson decays
Back in 2018, the physicists of the CMS experiment designed and recorded a B-meson-enriched data sample, the “B-Parking” data set. The B mesons (short for…
From time to time, we need to take our cars in for a checkup to make sure everything is up to speed, and here we check up on how well our CMS detector is working. The CMS detector is one of the main detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at…