Physicists at the CMS experiment are now very close to observing the simultaneous production of four top quarks (really two top quarks and two antitop quarks, but particle physicists describe this process as tttt) at the Large Hadron Collider for…
There is copious astrophysical and cosmological evidence for dark matter, but no indication of how it was produced, how it interacts with regular matter, or how it could fit into an inclusive model of particle physics. One possibility is that dark…
Since the discoveries of the third generation of quarks and leptons starting in the 1970s, physicists have asked the natural question "Can there be more generations?". One of the first key results from the Large Electron Positron collider LEP…
Over the past century, physicists have developed a theory governing the fundamental interactions of elementary particles, known as the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Thus far, it has stood up to many experimental tests with an extraordinary…
The Standard Model of particle physics asserts that the Higgs boson generates the mass of all fundamental particles. In 2012 a new particle was discovered at the CERN LHC that behaves closely like the Higgs particle predicted by the Standard Model.…
After the discovery of the Higgs boson, CMS observed its interaction with some standard model particles like the bottom and top quark, the tau lepton, and the W and Z boson. Measuring the strength of interactions with quarks and leptons (…
How long do fundamental particles live? In the Standard Model, we know particles can have many different lifetimes; from the top quark which decays in less than a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, to stable particles like the…
In November 2018 the proton-proton running of the LHC Run 2 ended. The data collected in 2018 is the largest sample ever collected at the LHC. Just under three months after the final proton proton collisions were recorded, the CMS collaboration…
The top quark is the heaviest particle in the standard model, and since its discovery in 1995 at the Tevatron collider at Fermilab, its study has become prominent in furthering our understanding of fundamental physics. At the Large Hadron Collider,…
With the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, an important piece in our puzzle to understand the Universe was found. However, there are still many open questions: why is the Higgs boson so light? What is dark matter? How does gravity work at…