CERN Accelerating science

Dear Colleagues,

After three years of very successful operation that led to the discovery of a new boson in 2012, the LHC is scheduled for a series of upgrades that will enhance the experimental potential to study the nature of the new particle, and to extend the searches for new physics beyond the Standard Model

Amongst all known elementary particles, the top quark is peculiar: weighing as much as a Tungsten atom, it completes the so-called 3rd generation of quarks and is the only quark whose properties can be directly measured.

Part of the CMS collaboration’s commitment to the ongoing experiments at the LHC is to participate in the detector shifts which occur 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

CMS has published its first paper on proton-lead (pPb) collisions, describing the observation of a phenomenon that was previously seen first in nucleus-nucleus collisions but also detected by CMS in proton-proton (pp) collisions.

All of the atoms in our bodies are made of electrons, protons and neutrons, and the protons and neutrons can be further broken down into quarks. Fundamentally, then, we are made of only two types of particles: electrons and quarks. But what do these labels mean?

Visitors to P5 now have a series of seven posters of beautiful 3D drawings of the CMS detector to look at before they go underground to the CMS cavern.

This series of the drawings is called “ZOOOM”.

By Siddharth Sehgal

Our best understanding of the early Universe tells us that a dense medium, known as the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), existed in the first microseconds after the big bang.

Guido Tonelli, CMS Spokesperson 2010–2011, was made 'Commendatore' of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republlic (Commendatore Ordine al Merito della Repubblica It