After months of winter shutdown, the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is once again seeing collisions and is ready to take data. The shutdown months have been very busy for CMS physicists, who used this downtime to improve the performance of the detector by completing upgrades and repairs of detector components. The LHC will continue running until December 2018 and is expected to deliver an additional 50 inverse femtobarns of integrated luminosity to the ATLAS and CMS experiments. This year of data-taking will conclude Run-2, after which the collider and its experiment will go into a two-year long shutdown for further upgrades.
Run-2 of the LHC has been highly successful, with close to 100 inverse femtobarns of integrated luminosity already delivered to the experiments in 2016 and 2017. These data sets enabled CMS physicists to perform many measurements of Standard Model parameters and searches for new physics. New data will allow CMS to further advance into previously uncharted territory. Physicists from the LHC Physics Center at Fermilab have been deeply involved in the work during the winter shutdown. They are now playing key roles in processing and certification of data recorded by the CMS detector, while looking forward to analyzing the new data sets for a chance to discover new physics.
Cecilia Gerber and Sergo Jindariani are co-coordinators of the LHC Physics Center at Fermilab.
This is an event display of one of the early 2018 collisions that took place at the CMS experiment at CERN.
Physicists at the CMS Remote Operations Center at Fermilab take shifts for certifying the data quality of the very first 2018 runs. Photo: Marguerite Tonjes
The Remote Operations Center at Fermilab keeps U.S. scientists vitally connected to activities at the CMS experiment. Photo: Gabriele Benelli