While experimental results at the LHC continue to show good agreement with the standard model (SM), which is currently the best theory of fundamental particle interactions, the CMS physicists continue to turn up the heat on the SM. In fact, it is…
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 LHC can be viewed not only as a hadron collider, but also as a boson collider. With the highest energies and collision rates ever, the LHC is pushing the limits of our understanding of rare processes such as W-photon scattering. The W bosons and…
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, collides protons at an energy of 13 TeV — thirteen thousand times the mass of a proton. The high energy of the accelerator allows searching for (and maybe finding) new particles, but also in-depth studies of the…
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) offers a unique opportunity to probe the internal structure of protons, with great precision and at unprecedented energies. According to Feynman’s parton model, protons are made up of three quarks, two “up” quarks…
Since the LHC collider started operating, more than a decade ago, several trillions of proton-proton collisions have taken place. Scientists have been painstakingly investigating the products of these collisions, as registered in their detectors, to…