CERN Accelerating science

A search for long-lived particles decaying into two muons has been performed by the CMS collaboration. Many scenarios of beyond standard model physics envisage such a possibility, whereby the exotic particles, travel before decaying, a considerable distance which can range from few microns to several kilometres depending on detailed properties. The striking experimental signature of such a phenomena is two muon tracks originating away from the collision region.

CMS looked for a relatively rare decay mode of the Higgs boson, viz., to a Z boson and a photon (H → Z𝛾 ). The Z was identified via its decays to electron and muon pairs (e+e- or 𝝁+ 𝝁-). The spectrum for the combined mass of the three particles (e+, e- and 𝛾 and 𝝁+ , 𝝁- and 𝛾 ) in data showed a small bulge near the measured mass of the H, indicating possible presence of excess events due to the decay H → Z𝛾. To be more confident about it, more data is required. Stay tuned!

Experiments have established that the neutrinos do have non-zero mass but extremely tiny, though in standard model they are treated as mass-less. This can be explained using theoretical ideas of Majorana and Weinberg. The testable prediction at the LHC is the production of 2 same-sign muons unaccompanied by neutrinos. Data collected by the CMS experiment were found to be compatible with the backgrounds only for such a process, unfortunately.

Ask someone what experiments at the CERN-LHC do, they will tell you: ‘You accelerate two protons to very high energy, smash them together and look in great detail at all particles created from the disintegration of the protons.’ etcetera. Well… yes… mostly.

The CMS collaboration has substantially improved the precision with which the top quark mass is measured. The latest result, a measurement of the top quark mass of 171.77 ± 0.38 GeV, was presented at CERN last week and estimates the value of the top quark mass with a precision of about 0.22%. The gain comes from new analysis methods and improved procedures to consistently treat uncertainties in the measurement simultaneously.

In heavy ion collisions, for ultra-peripheral processes, simultaneous emission of photons by oppositely moving 2 lead ions can occasionally produce a pair of tau leptons. The CMS Collaboration has observed such a phenomena, for the first time in the LHC data. The results were presented in the recently concluded Moriond and Quark Matter conferences.

Running toward the start of Run3 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the CMS experiment completed one of its last and crucial steps: the big solenoid magnet has been powered on to reach the nominal magnetic field of 3.8T on March 4th 2022.

State-of-the art machine learning techniques have been used by scientists of the CMS collaboration to identify efficiently the hadronic decays of the tau leptons vis-a-vis jets (sprays of particles boosted in a given direction). This will help the CMS experiment in a big way to discriminate quickly, in real time of the LHC collision, the physics processes involving tau leptons and extract interesting physics from the collected data subsequently.

Physicists at the CMS experiment have been searching for new particles in exciting new places. In a recently published paper, they explore the possibility that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could be producing never-before-seen particles that travel into the CMS detector before transforming into known particles. And because no one knows for sure what undiscovered particles might look like, the scientists design the search to be as simple as possible to make sure it can test many theories at once, including ones that have yet to be imagined.