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For Reham Aly from Egypt, now a graduate student on CMS at the University of Bari, Italy, this was the first visit to the United States and Fermilab. She had been invited to come to work at the Fermilab LHC Physics Center for two months. Another student, Angela Taliercio, an Italian working on her Ph.D. at the University of Louvain, Belgium, had visited the LPC in 2018. The rewarding experience she had, she says, made her want to come back. Reham and Angela spent staggered two-month periods at Fermilab, from October to December 2019.

The 17 CMS physicists selected in a competitive process as Distinguished Researchers for 2020, 14 juniors and three seniors, are accomplished individuals at various stages of their careers. The program provides resources to help strengthen their research programs while contributing to research activities at the LHC Physics Center.

The Fermilab LHC Physics Center and Northwestern University recently hosted about 40 participants – experimentalists at the LHC experiments and theorists — for a two-day workshop titled “Multibosons at the Energy Frontier.” Discussions focused on strategies to best exploit the LHC data in the study of multiboson events.

The CMS collaboration reached a major milestone last week by submitting for publication its 900th paper. Since 2010, CMS has been publishing about 100 papers every year on physics analyses using LHC collision data.

From Jan. 14-18, more than 100 graduate students, postdocs and faculty from around the world came to Fermilab to participate in the school. Students are coached by CMS experts in hands-on sessions covering topics such as particle identification, statistics, machine learning and triggering. They also learn how to write high-quality scientific publications.

As co-coordinator, Gerber has been instrumental in supporting highly successful efforts at the LPC while introducing new programs and shaping the future of the center. Under her leadership, the LPC took a leading role in Run-2 data analyses, detector operation and upgrade efforts. She is looking forward to continuing to support the LPC and its residents.

The Distinguished Researchers program has been a defining feature of the LPC at Fermilab for the last eight years. The 21 CMS physicists selected as LPC Distinguished Researchers, 18 juniors and three seniors, are accomplished individuals at different stages of their careers. This program provides resources to help strengthen and expand their research programs. This year’s Distinguished Researchers were selected by the LPC Management Board in a competitive process.

The year 2018 will be remembered as a very eventful year for CMS as a whole and especially for the Fermilab group. Thanks to excellent accelerator performance, the LHC delivered much more proton-proton collision data than anticipated, making the LHC Run 2 a very successful data-taking period. Being at the very core of the detector operations and computing, the Fermilab group was key in ensuring that a large and high quality data set was collected for searches and precision measurements.

The jet physics community has been active in adapting and developing machine learning techniques with connections to computer vision, natural language processing and other areas.

On Aug. 28, the CMS collaboration announced the observation of the Higgs-to-bb decay mode with the significance of 5 sigma. The roots of the CMS Higgs-to-bb analysis lie at the Fermilab LHC Physics Center.