CMS is one of the largest international collaborations with about 4300 particle physics, engineers, technicians, students and support staff from 179 universities and institutes in 41 countries. CMS is one of the two general-purpose experiments at the CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that have been built to search for new physics. Scientists are looking into the unkonwn and trying to answer the most fundamental questions about our Universe.
Higgs boson discovery
In 2012 the LHC collaboration announced the discovery of the long-sought Higgs boson particle which was predicted back in the 1960’s by the British theoretical physics Peter Higgs. He proposed the Higgs field in which the Higgs boson is a quantum excitation, the presence of this field explains the mechanism by which some particles acquire mass. This discovery complement the Standard Model of particle physics and constitute one of the greatest achievements at the LHC.
Beyond the Standard Model
The observation of the Higgs boson particle marked the beginning of the LHC research program. Since then major improvements and maintenance work have been performed to the accelerator and every detector (including the CMS experiment), this will continue in the coming years until reach the optimal center of mass energy and number of collisions per second. The aim is to collect enough data to perform a detailed study of the properties of the newly discovered particle and understand deeply its nature. In parallel searches for new physics phenoma continue as we still need to understand fundamental questions in nature as the origin of dark matter. Our research group participates actively in both detector performance for the upgrade of the muon system in CMS and data anlysis for the search of physics beyond the standard model, details about our research topics can be seen here.