CMS

Scientists know the Higgs boson interacts with extremely massive particles. Now, they’re starting to study how it interacts with lighter particles as well.

The ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN have announced new results that show that the Higgs boson decays into two muons. US CMS — the United States contingent of the global CMS collaboration — played a crucial role in this result, contributing to the excellent performance of CMS detector.

On June 19, scientists at the CMS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider published their 1,000th paper. The monumental achievement reflects an incomparable contribution to humanity’s understanding of the universe — and it’s just the beginning.

What if you want to capture an image of a process so fast that it looks blurry if the shutter is open for even a billionth of a second? This is the type of challenge scientists on experiments like CMS and ATLAS face as they study particle collisions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. An extremely fast new detector inside the CMS detector will allow physicists to get a sharper image of particle collisions.

Those who study particle physics will find that every step of the journey offers a new perspective and new set of responsibilities. Symmetry chats with scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider to hear about differences between seven different rungs on the academic career ladder.

The USCMS collaboration has received approval from the Department of Energy to move forward with final planning for upgrades to the giant CMS particle detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The upgrades will enable it to take clearer, more precise images of particle events emerging from the upcoming High-Luminosity LHC, whose collision rate will get a 10-fold boost compared to the collider’s design value when it comes online in 2027.

From CERN, Oct. 15, 2019: A new result by the CMS Collaboration narrows down the mass of the Higgs boson to a precision of 0.1%. After reporting the observation of the Higgs boson at the CERN LHC in 2012, scientists the ATLAS and CMS collaborations have been busy understanding exactly its place within the standard model of particle physics. Any straying from expectations could be an indication of new physics.

From CERN, Oct. 7, 2019: The CMS collaboration has measured for the first time the variation, or “running,” of the top quark mass. The theory of quantum chromodynamics predicts this energy-scale variation for the masses of all quarks and for the strong force acting between them. Observing the running masses of quarks can therefore provide a way of testing quantum chromodynamics and the Standard Model.