The heaviest known particle, the top quark, is one of our main gateways to search for new phenomena that are not addressed by our existing knowledge, the standard model of particle physics (SM), either through precision measurements of the top…
Have you heard of vector-like quarks? They are hypothetical particles which would provide an explanation to the value of the Higgs boson mass, which is still a mystery. Vector-like quarks are predicted by a variety of theories beyond the Standard…
Rare events, such as a total solar eclipse or a supernova explosion, are fascinating and stimulate our imagination. In addition, such events may lead to discoveries expanding our ​​knowledge horizon. At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), studies of…
CMS has developed a new method to measure the properties of the top quark with high precision. It relies on an innovative way to cluster particles into jets.  The top quark is the most massive elementary particle we have discovered so far. Due to…
The processes that are mostly studied at the LHC are caused by energetic collisions where the protons break up into their constituents, the quarks and gluons, which recombine to form composite hadrons. However, many proton-proton interactions result…
Exactly ten years ago, on the 4th of July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments announced the discovery of a new particle compatible with the long-sought Higgs boson.   This discovery takes us back to the events occurring in our early universe, just a…
The CMS detector, illustrated in Fig. 1, is centred around the largest and highest granularity silicon tracker ever built, including around twenty thousand detector units structured in thin cylindrical layers that extend over nearly 6 metres along…
The recent results from the Muon g-2 Collaboration have added to the growing tension between the measured and predicted values of the muon’s magnetic moment. The equivalent measurement of this property for the electron is a cornerstone of quantum…
  New in! CMS physicists search for heavy cousins of the neutrino in beauty meson decays Back in 2018, the physicists of the CMS experiment designed and recorded a B-meson-enriched data sample, the “B-Parking” data set. The B mesons (short for…
From time to time, we need to take our cars in for a checkup to make sure everything is up to speed, and here we check up on how well our CMS detector is working. The CMS detector is one of the main detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at…