In this short series, we look at the different types of tests and steps needed for CMS to run at the precision the experiment requires. Find part 1 here! Part 2 First Beam Arrives So far, the only tests and alignments that have taken place have…

It is compelling to picture large physics labs with lots of sparks and heavy levers that wake up big, important experiments with sparks and loud bangs. Even if this were the case, CMS is too big and too complex to be started up by a simple pull of a…

  CMS has recently conducted the largest deletion campaign in its history, deleting roughly 85 Petabytes (85’000’000’000’000’000 bytes) of data from the magnetic tapes, in order to free up space for the Run 3 collisions. No original raw data…

  Data taking is restarting in CMS for the continuation of Run 3 - and with it the enormous responsibility of keeping the data safe and making sure it is usable in order to conduct the physics analyses. Last April 2023, the Large Hadron…

  Everything started in early September 2022 while, during the ECAL Operations meeting that we hold every Wednesday morning, our veteran electronics expert, Evgueni, reported that the voltage in a control card was unstable. He prophetically…

This October, the first component of the milliQan detector has been installed on top of the CMS experimental cavern, and it is now taking data at the high energy of LHC RUN3. The milliQan detector project was proposed as a new LHC experiment in 2016…

While the CMS detector takes data 24 /7, physicists take turns in the control room every 8 hours, ensuring continuity of operations and keeping the detector running continuously. Experts located around the world are present at all times to respond…

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 Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is gradually restarting and in the summer bunches of protons will collide again at high energy, marking the start of Run 3.  Is CMS ready to manage the big amount of new data? The CMS Data Acquisition and…

Running toward the start of Run3 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the CMS experiment completed one of its last and crucial steps: the big solenoid magnet has been powered on to reach the nominal magnetic field of 3.8T on March 4th 2022. Hidden…

A few months are left before the start of Run 3 at CERN. With the timely completion of all upgrades planned for Long Shutdown 2 (LS2), in the last weeks the CMS detector has been set in its closed configuration. If this sounds like an ordinary or…

The challenge of Run3: CMS is preparing to resume its operations for the Run-3 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) after a 3-year long shutdown called LS2 (2019-2021). The time of LS2 was used to perform upgrades, which are regularly conducted…