Image credit: Jennifer James (Vanderbilt)
Imagine going to an optician to check your vision. You are looking at a series of letters "E" in different orientations. When these letters get smaller and smaller, the horizontal lines in the "E" get closer…
The study of the Higgs boson is one of the main goals of the physics program of the CMS experiment. The data collected up to now at the LHC helped us to refine our understanding of the Higgs mechanism, which is responsible for the generation…
The completion of the standard model (SM) with the discovery of the Higgs boson stands as a resounding success in the world of particle physics. However, significant questions remain unanswered, such as the nature of dark matter (DM), and the…
Top quarks are the heaviest known elementary particles, as heavy as a tungsten atom. In high energy proton proton collisions at the LHC about 10 pairs of a top quark and its antiparticle are produced every second. But they are not here to…
Recent observations from experiments worldwide have reported anomalies in the decays of a bottom quark to a charm quark, a charged lepton (electron, muon, or tau), and the corresponding neutrino. These observations hint at possible deviations…
Did you know that every second more than 100 trillion tiny particles called neutrinos pass through your body without causing any harm? These mysterious particles are produced abundantly throughout the universe in events like nuclear reactions…
Recently, and about two decades after the first solid proof of entanglement between two photons by Anton Zeilinger and his team, the ATLAS and CMS experiments reported the observation of quantum entanglement between the top quark and its…
It might have occurred to you to look with curiosity at your present the day of your birthday. Wrapped in colorful paper, a surprise was waiting for you. You might be the kind of person who rushes to remove the packaging to see what’s…
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…
When we look at ourselves in a mirror, we see a virtual twin, identical but with left and right inverted. Charge-parity (CP) is the equivalent of a mirror for fundamental particles. If the symmetry was respected in nature, each particle would see a…
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…