CERN Accelerating science

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.

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.

The Large Hadron Collider has woken from its winter slumber with a bang.