I have been a physicist working for CMS for about ten years now, and a guitarist for about twice as long. From time to time I have tried to somehow marry these two worlds, and when I became interested in guitar building I realised that I need to build a “CMS guitar”.

Every year CERN opens its doors to hundreds of high-school students who wish to get an in-depth look at what it is like to be a scientist or engineer at one of the world’s most prestigious research laboratories.

The Quark Matter 2012 conference, held in Washington DC from 13-18 August 2012, brings together experimental and theoretical experts in the area of heavy-ion physics.

CMS has just passed another major milestone, recording more than 10 inverse femtobarns of data at 8 TeV.

Despite higher pile-up creating more complicated events, CMS improved its running efficiency and now regularly achieves efficiencies in excess of 95, 97 or even 98% each day.

31 July 2012, CERN

Version française ci-dessous / French version below

The Prime Minister of France Jean-Marc Ayrault visited CERN on the 30th of July, accompanied by the Minister of Higher Education and Research Mme Geneviève Fioraso.

Jets are the experimental signatures of quarks and gluons produced in high-energy processes such as head-on proton-proton collisions.

Our understanding of physical reality — of everything and nothing — has changed forever. We don't yet know where we are heading, but nothing will ever be the same. As a scientist, I don't know what more I could ask for.

Signaling a likely end to one of the longest, most expensive searches in the history of science, physicists said Wednesday that they had discovered a new subatomic particle that looks for all the world like the Higgs boson, a key to understanding why there is diversity and life in the universe.

Cern scientists reporting from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have claimed the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson.

CMS Experiment, CERN
4 July 2012

4th July Higgs Seminar

On 4th July, at 09:00 CEST, CMS will present their latest results on the search for the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson at the LHC.

CMS 2012 data exceed 2011 sample

LHC has delivered 6.65 fb⁻¹ of collisions to CMS in 2012 so far

While the LHC will play the starring role in the 2013/2014 Long Shutdown (LS1), the break will also be a chance for its experiments to upgrade their detectors.

The search for microscopic black holes at the LHC is motivated by the hierarchy problem — the huge observed difference between the strengths of the electroweak and gravitational forces.

A measurement of the underlying event (UE) activity in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV is performed using Drell-Yan events in a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 2.2 fb⁻¹

Another day, another particle. Unlike the Higgs boson, the neutral Xi_b baryon is not expected to solve any deep, outstanding mysteries. But, sightings of its excited state are another first for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.

Physicists using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator have discovered their first brand-new baryon, a particle consisting of three quarks.

A never-before-seen subatomic particle has popped into existence inside the world's largest atom smasher, bringing physicists a step closer to unraveling the mystery of how matter is put together in the universe.

Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider submitted a paper to Physical Review Letters claiming that they’d discovered a new Baryon particle. This is the Xi_b^*0 – which is composed of three quarks: a strange quark, a beauty quark, and an up quark.

Scientists running the Large Hadron Collider, aka the "big bang machine", announced Friday they've discovered a brand new particle during one of their experiments.

It has not discovered the Higgs Boson — not yet, anyway — but the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator has revealed a never-before-discovered particle comprised of three quarks.

Observation of a new beauty particle

New, excited Ξ^*_b⁰ baryon observed with more than 5 standard deviations significance at a mass of 5945.0 ± 2.8 MeV.

No, unfortunately not yet the discovery of the century. Still, the new particle found by CMS in its 2011 dataset is a very important piece of the puzzle of low-energy spectroscopy.

An application using real event data from CMS has won “Best Science” prize in a public “Science Hack Day” held in Nairobi between 13^th and 15^th April 2012.

Tejinder (Jim) Virdee, CMS co-founder and former Spokesperson (2006-2010), was today elected as Fellow of the prestigious Royal Society of the UK.

The Year-End Technical Stop or YETS, when the LHC takes its annual break, seemed like a quiet time to those outside CERN. After all, there were no collisions taking place and the CMS detector was not operating 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week.

A new year with new energy and new luminosities: 2012 holds the promise to close the question on the existence (or absence) of a Standard Model Higgs boson.

As high-energy particle physics pushes exploration at energy and luminosity frontiers, experiments are becoming increasingly complex – and this, in turn, drives the need for developments in particle detectors and their associated technologies.