CERN Accelerating science

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

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.