CMS collaboration publishes 1,000th paper

The discovery of the Higgs particle by the international CMS and ATLAS collaborations is the most famous discovery made to date at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The scientists made the announcement on July 4, 2012, and it was later recognized with a Nobel Prize: The theorists who predicted the Higgs mechanism received the award in 2013.

Most impressively, it only was publication number 183 for the CMS collaboration. On June 19, CMS scientists celebrated publishing their 1,000^th peer-reviewed research paper.

It’s an unprecedented achievement. For the last 10 years, CMS scientists have been producing, testing and publishing insights arising from the spectacular particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, describing fundamental aspects of the quantum universe in one paper after another. Peering into the behavior of nature’s most fundamental constituents through the lens of the humming, high-tech machine known as the CMS particle detector, the CMS collaboration has contributed immensely to the very foundations of knowledge in particle physics.

Churning out raw data from a cavern located 100 meters below the French countryside, the CMS detector has produced enough data for its collaboration to publish on average more than 100 research papers per year.

On June 19, CMS scientists celebrated publishing their 1,000th peer-reviewed research paper. For the last 10 years, scientists have been producing, testing and publishing insights arising from particle collisions inside the CMS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Photo: CERN

The CMS detector is one of four large detectors situated around the 27-kilometer ring that is the LHC. The other three are ATLAS, LHCb and ALICE. Together, a community of more than 10,000 scientists, students, engineers and technicians of all sorts keep the detectors running and analyze the data they generate.

“A thousand very high-quality scientific papers in a decade is an amazing result, testimony of the rich physics spectrum provided by the LHC data, the versatility of our experiment and the ingenuity and dedication of our collaborators,” said CERN scientist and University of Padova Professor Roberto Carlin, CMS experiment spokesperson. “We are very proud of them, and we look forward to the results we will produce in the coming decades. These will allow us to make further significant progress in the understanding of the universe.”

The papers submitted by the CMS collaboration can be sorted into seven areas of physics research. Five of these areas are measurements related to physics described by the Standard Model of particles and forces, bottom quark physics, top quark physics, Higgs boson physics, and detector performance. The CMS collaboration has rediscovered with great precision the known particles and forces of the Standard Model, confirming many of its predictions and measuring its characteristic parameters with unprecedented precision.

A sixth area is heavy-ion physics. Most of the time, the LHC produces head-on proton-proton collisions, which is the subject of about 90% of the CMS papers. But the collider goes through runs in which it sends beams of lead ions, instead of protons, into the heart of the CMS detector for study. About one in 10 of CMS’ published papers involves heavy-ion physics and data gathered during these runs.

The seventh area is the exploration of extensions of the Standard Model of elementary particles and their interactions. The Standard Model is humanity’s current best theory to describe fundamental particles and forces, but it is not able to explain some big questions in particle physics: Why is there more matter than antimatter in the universe? What is dark matter made of? Is there more than one Higgs particle? CMS scientists aim to answer these questions, which will require extensions of the Standard Model.

“We are proud of reaching the unprecedented, historic landmark with the submission of CMS’ 1,000th paper for publication,” said Boaz Klima, CMS Publications Committee chair. He added that “the scientific impact of CMS publications has been at the highest level. Their quality as well as diversity of physics topics is unparalleled.”

The LHC and CMS were built to study aspects of the universe never before probed. These investigations examine extra dimensions, mini black holes, string balls, dark matter candidates, the existence of long-lived particles and other phenomena that excite, inspire and could revolutionize our understanding of the subatomic world. Another very important chapter in the CMS program is the search for supersymmetric particles.

The collaboration’s 1,000th paper reflects significant contributions from the United States contingent, known as US CMS, and the LHC Physics Center, which is the home base of CMS scientists in the United States, hosted at the Department of Energy’s Fermilab. More than 90% of the US CMS institutions have members associated with the LHC Physics Center, which boasts a wide geographic diversity from all corners of the country. The center’s events serve 800 scientists and students every year.

“It is important to realize that while CMS is an international collaboration with members from 238 institutes from 55 countries, US CMS makes up about a third of this collaboration,” said Brown University scientist Meenakshi Narain, chair of the US CMS collaboration. “Therefore, the impact of U.S. physicists on the achievements of the CMS collaboration, including the papers published, are rather impressive and enhanced by their creativity and ingenuity in deploying cutting-edge analysis techniques to unravel the mysteries of the universe.”

About 75% of CMS publications have direct contributions to the analysis by US CMS scientists.

“The LHC has delivered only 5% of the planned collisions. The remaining 95% to be collected in between now and the mid-2030s will represent the largest proton-proton data set ever collected in history. To fully exploit the unprecedented discovery potential of the machine, the CMS detector is being upgraded these days with state-of-the-art technologies,” said scientist Anadi Canepa, head of the CMS Department at Fermilab, which is the host laboratory for the US CMS collaboration. “The breadth, scientific impact and sophistication of the LHC experiments are unparalleled. These endeavors are building the foundations of our understanding of nature for decades to come.”

Research at the Large Hadron Collider is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Science Foundation. The Department of Energy’s Fermilab is the lead institution for U.S. participation in the CMS experiment at the LHC. With more than 1,000 participants from 49 institutions across the United States, US CMS is the largest national group in the 3,600-member international CMS collaboration.

Fermilab is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.

It started with a blast.

On June 23, construction company Kiewit Alberici Joint Venture set off explosives 3,650 feet beneath the surface in Lead, South Dakota, to begin creating space for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by the Department of Energy’s Fermilab.

The blast is the start of underground excavation activity for the experiment, known as DUNE, and the infrastructure that powers and houses it, called the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility, or LBNF.

Situated a mile deep in South Dakota rock at the Sanford Underground Research Facility, DUNE’s giant particle detector will track the behavior of fleeting particles called neutrinos. The plan for the next three years is that workers will blast and drill to remove 800,000 tons of rock to make a home for the gigantic detector and its support systems.

“The start of underground blasting for these early excavation activities marks not only the initiation of the next major phase of this work, but significant progress on the construction already under way to prepare the site for the experiment,” said Fermilab Deputy Director for LBNF/DUNE-US Chris Mossey.

Excavation activities for the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility began with first blast on June 23. Workers inspect the space cleared by the blast 3,650 feet below ground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. They will eventually excavate hundreds of thousands of tons of rock to make way for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab, and LBNF, which is the infrastructure that supports and houses the experiment. Photo: Kiewit Alberici Joint Venture

The excavation work begins with removing 3,000 tons of rock 3,650 feet below ground. This initial step carves out a station for a massive drill whose bore is as wide as a car is long, about four meters.

The machine will help create a 1,200-foot ventilation shaft down to what will be the much larger cavern for the DUNE particle detector and associated infrastructure. There, 4,850 feet below the surface — about 1.5 kilometers deep — the LBNF project will remove hundreds of thousands of tons of rock, roughly the weight of eight aircraft carriers.

The emptied space will eventually be filled with DUNE’s enormous and sophisticated detector, a neutrino hunter looking for interactions from one of the universe’s most elusive particles. Researchers will send an intense beam of neutrinos from Fermilab in Illinois to the underground detector in South Dakota – straight through the earth, no tunnel necessary – and measure how the particles change their identities. What they learn may answer one of the biggest questions in physics: Why does matter exist instead of nothing at all?

“The worldwide particle physics community is preparing in various ways for the day DUNE comes online, and this week, we take the material step of excavating rock to support the detector,” said DUNE spokesperson Stefan Söldner-Rembold of the University of Manchester. “It’s a wonderful example of collaboration: While excavation takes place in South Dakota, DUNE partners around the globe are designing and building the parts for the DUNE detector.”

A number of science experiments already take data at Sanford Underground Research Facility, but no activity takes place at the 3650 level. With nothing and no one in the vicinity, the initial excavation stage to create the cavern for the drill proceeds in an isolated environment. It’s also an opportunity for the LBNF construction project to gather information about matters such as air flow and the rock’s particular response to the drill-and-blast technique before moving on to the larger excavation at the 4850 level, where the experiment will be built.

“It was important for us to develop a plan that would allow the LBNF excavation to go forward without disrupting the experiments already going on in other parts of the 4850 level,” said Fermilab Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility Far-Site Conventional Facilities Manager Joshua Willhite. Following a period of excavation at the 3650 level, the project will initiate excavation at the 4850 level.

Every bit of the 800,000 tons of rock dislodged by the underground drill-and-blast operation must eventually be transported a mile back up to the surface. There, a conveyor is being built to transport the crushed rock over a stretch of 4,200 feet for final deposit in the Open Cut, an enormous open pit mining area excavated in the 1980s. As large as the LBNF excavation will be, the rock moved to the surface and deposited in the Open Cut will fill less than one percent of it.

Excavation at the 3650 level will be completed over the next few months, with blasting at the 4850 level planned to begin immediately after.

Learn more about the science of the DUNE experiment at lbnf-dune.fnal.gov.

Work on LBNF and DUNE is supported by the DOE Office of Science and international partners in more than 30 countries.

Today marks the start of the 29^th International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics, which brings together thousands of researchers for the latest developments in the field. A record number of participants are gathering virtually to share science about one of the most enigmatic particles in the Standard Model.

The conference runs from June 22 to July 2. More details are available in the conference’s media advisory.

Fermilab neutrino research is supported by the DOE Office of Science.

A record 2,700-plus registrants from around the world will gather online from June 22 to July 2 for Neutrino 2020, the biggest conference in neutrino physics. This year the event is hosted by the Department of Energy’s Fermilab and the University of Minnesota. The meeting brings together experts in the field to share the latest findings and future plans in neutrino research.

Neutrinos are exciting and enigmatic particles that may hold clues to some of the big mysteries in physics. They’ve been a hot topic in both science and the news recently. Signals of unexpectedly energetic neutrinos arrived in Antarctic weather balloons. Data have shown hints that neutrinos and their antimatter twins may not act as expected, a potential tie to why the universe is so full of matter. Enormous international collaborations are building gigantic experiments to better understand the little particle.

“Neutrinos are such an interesting avenue of research to explore because they hold so many secrets,” said Steve Brice, a scientist at Fermilab and one of the conference organizers. “We know there is physics beyond the Standard Model, our current understanding of the universe. Pursuing neutrinos is one of our best hopes of learning more of these fundamental truths about our world.”

The headline talk by University of Wisconsin-Madison physicist Francis Halzen will look to the future role neutrinos can play in multi-messenger astronomy, the coordinated collection of different kinds of signals (such as those from gravitational waves) from beyond our solar system. Combined, these messengers provide a new window into our cosmos. David Nygren of the University of Texas Arlington will give the second headline talk, showcasing the progress in R&D for neutrino detectors.

Each day will feature updates and plans relating to one or two topics within neutrino physics. These include directly measuring the still-unknown mass of the neutrino, neutrino interactions, solar neutrinos, neutrino theory, neutrino cosmology and astronomy, reactor neutrinos, neutrinoless double beta decay, sterile neutrinos, and neutrino mixing. One day will be dedicated to long-distance neutrino experiments, including the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment hosted by Fermilab and the Hyper-Kamiokande experiment hosted by Japan.

The conference will be held entirely online this year for the first time, with fewer talks per day but the time period extended to two weeks to accommodate international participants in multiple time zones. Neutrino 2020 will start at 7 a.m. Central time on June 22 and run through July 2. The change has allowed triple the typical number of participants to sign up for the conference and resulted in an increased number of abstracts submitted for the poster session.

“We’re really trying to delocalize and adapt for a worldwide audience,” Brice said. “There are people engaged in this conference that wouldn’t have been able to come to an in-person event.”

Talks are scheduled with consideration for the presenter’s local time, and speakers are encouraged to make their slides available so that those in other time zones can ask questions in advance and have them answered in the live presentation.

The full schedule of events and additional details are available on the conference website.

Fermilab neutrino research is supported by the DOE Office of Science.