CERN Accelerating science

New results on the Higgs-like boson, Supersymmetry, and searches for exotic physics

In the early hours of 14 February 2013, the first period of running for the Large Hadron Collider came to an end. After three very fruitful years of collisions at the LHC, the blank screens of LHC Page 1 seem very odd.

On Saturday at 8.25am the shift crew in the CERN Control Centre extracted the beams from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), bringing the machine’s first three-year running period to a successful conclusion. The following message marked the event on LHC Page 1: "No beam for a while.

The LHC has just delivered the first pPb (proton-lead) collisions with stable beams of 2013 and CMS is happily running with all sub-detectors on. We are also having common triggers with TOTEM and everything is behaving very well.

The new year brings a new type of collision at the LHC: the accelerator will smash protons and lead nuclei together, allowing CMS and the other LHC experiments to study the cold nuclear matter we expect these collisions to produce.

Dear CMS members,

The CMS CB career committee hopes you all had a restful vacation and will have a great new year!

In 2011, CMS presented early evidence that Upsilon (Υ) particles produced in lead-lead collisions “melt” as a consequence of interacting with the hot nuclear matter created in these heavy-ion interactions

In the vast particle landscape, there are, to borrow a phrase, known knowns (the Standard Model, for example), unknown unknowns (exotic extensions of the Standard Model and beyond), and those ever-interesting known unknowns. A recent CMS observation perfectly fits into this third category.

Collaborations of high-energy physicists often number in the thousands, and this presents some unique challenges. “CMS is a big collaboration, with 3,000 people from diverse backgrounds, speaking different languages,” says Sudhir Malik, co-convener of the CMS Data Analysis School (CMSDAS).

Kyoto, Japan on 12–16 November 2012