Category: Explainers

  • Observation of a New Particle with a Mass of 125 GeV

    Observation of a New Particle with a Mass of 125 GeV

    In a joint seminar today at CERN and the “ICHEP 2012” conference in Melbourne, researchers of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) presented their preliminary results on the search for the standard model (SM) Higgs boson in their data recorded up to June 2012.

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  • Blinding and unblinding analyses

    Blinding and unblinding analyses

    CMS performs searches for new particles by looking for signals amidst a background of known physics.

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  • Antimatter in CMS

    Spot the difference So how did the universe evolve into this very asymmetric state, dominated by matter, if the underlying forces can barely tell the difference between the two?

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  • What and where is Antimatter?

    Antimatter detectives The antimatter is missing – not from CERN, but from the Universe!

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  • Heavy Ions in CMS

    Probing the Plasma Lead nuclei consist of large numbers of protons and neutrons, both made up of quarks.

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  • How did Matter form?

    Colliding heavy nuclei Clues to the early Universe The Universe has changed a great deal in the 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang, but the basic building blocks of everything from microbes to galaxies were signed, sealed and delivered in the first few millionths of a second.

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  • Detecting extra dimensions

    Superstring theory is elegant but speculative and throws up a number of possible experimental outcomes, some more likely than others.

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  • Do we really live in only three dimensions?

    String theory and extra dimensions Loose ends Will the string tie the Standard package?

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  • Detecting Dark Matter

    Evidence from the depths of the Universe has ruled out a number of models for what the mysterious dark matter might be, but one candidate that fits so far is the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP) otherwise known as the “neutralino”, the lightest of a whole range of new particles suggested by a theory called supersymmetry.

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  • What is the Universe really made of?

    What is the Universe really made of?

    Dark secrets of the Universe It’s perhaps natural that we don’t know much about how the Universe was created – after all, we were never there ourselves.

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