CMS

CMS

A 13 TeV collision recorded by the CMS detector showing two high-energy particle jets with a collective mass of 5 TeV.

CMS is an experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that is searching for new physics. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN smashes protons together at close to the speed of light with seven times the energy of the most powerful accelerators built up to now. Some of the collision energy is turned into mass, creating new particles which are observed in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) particle detector. The CMS detector is a 5 storey-high digital camera recording hundreds of images per second of debris from LHC particle collisions. CMS data is analyzed by scientists around the world to build up a picture of what happened at the heart of the collision. This will help us answer questions such as: "what is the Universe really made of and what forces act within it?" and "what gives everything substance?" Such research increases our basic understanding and may also spark new technologies that change the world we live in.

The LHC smashes groups of protons together at close to the speed of light: 40 million times per second and with seven times the energy of the most powerful accelerators built up to now. Many of these will just be glancing blows but some will be head on collisions and very energetic. When this happens some of the energy of the collision is turned into mass and previously unobserved, short-lived particles – which could give clues about how Nature behaves at a fundamental level - fly out and into the detector.

CMS is a particle detector that is designed to see a wide range of particles and phenomena produced in high-energy collisions in the LHC. Like a cylindrical onion, different layers of detectors measure the different particles, and use this key data to build up a picture of events at the heart of the collision. Scientists then use this data to search for new phenomena that will help to answer questions such as: What is the Universe really made of and what forces act within it? And what gives everything substance? CMS will also measure the properties of previously discovered particles with unprecedented precision, and be on the lookout for completely new, unpredicted phenomena.

On 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider announced they had each observed a new particle in the mass region around 126 GeV. This particle is consistent with the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model. The Higgs boson, as proposed within the Standard Model, is the simplest manifestation of the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism. Other types of Higgs bosons are predicted by other theories that go beyond the Standard Model. On 8 October 2013 the Nobel prize in physics (link is external) was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

CMS
The Standard Model

In the picture you can see quarks and leptons and the force mediating particles which are the constitutents of the Standard Model. One important piece which we now belive to have found for the first time is the Higgs particle.

The High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) project aims to crank up the performance of the LHC in order to increase the potential for discoveries after 2025. The objective is to increase luminosity by a factor of 10 beyond the LHC’s design value. Luminosity is an important indicator of the performance of an accelerator: it is proportional to the number of collisions that occur in a given amount of time. The higher the luminosity, the more data the experiments can gather to allow them to observe rare processes. The High-Luminosity LHC, which should be operational by 2025, will allow precise studies of the new particles observed at the LHC, such as the Higgs boson. It will allow the observation of rare processes that are inaccessible at the LHC’s current sensitivity level. For example, the High-Luminosity LHC will produce up to 15 million Higgs bosons per year, compared to the 1.2 million produced in 2011 and 2012. The High-Luminosity LHC project was announced as the top priority of the European Strategy for Particle Physics in 2013 and its funding is enshrined in CERN’s Medium-Term Plan.

Since the start of the LHC operation in 2009, members of ITU have substantially contributed to the detector operations, detector upgrade, searches for signs of supersymmertry and Forward Physics within CMS community.