Quarks are elementary particles in the Standard Model and the building blocks of the protons and neutrons in atoms. The dominant force between quarks is the strong interaction. Gluons are the force carriers of the strong interaction, and one thing…

At a virtual ceremony, held on the 21st of May 2021, the European Academy of Sciences presented its 2020 Blaise Pascal Medal for Physics to our former Spokesperson Tejinder Virdee. At the ceremony Tejinder gave a talk about the significance of the…

Professor Geoff Hall from Imperial London College has been elected for the prestigious fellowship granted by the Royal Society. Fellows and Foreign Members are elected for life through a peer review process on the basis of excellence in science.…

In the LHC, groups of 100 billion protons collide 25 million times every second. But most of these protons miss, so each time we point the protons at each other doesn't give us 100 million proton-proton collisions.  In fact, collisions are much…

Reaching another major milestone of the Long shutdown 2 and performing the biggest upgrade of the experimental beam vacuum system since the first operation of CMS in 2008. After several years of complex design, manufacture and planning, the CMS…

The CMS Collaboration Board has elected Dr. Claudia-Elisabeth Wulz as the next CMS Collaboration Board Chair following Prof. Harrison Prosper’s mandate which ends on the 31st of August 2021.   The Collaboration Board is the governing body…

The CMS collaboration has submitted a paper with a new, precise analysis of the data enriched in the Higgs boson decays to four leptons. Simultaneous measurement of the Higgs boson production and decay was essential in this analysis.  The…

Experimental evidence from the last half-century has established the standard model as a foundational theory of particle physics. Still, it is clear that the standard model is not the final theory. There are many open questions: Is the mass of Higgs…

The Standard Model of the fundamental particles describes the W and Z bosons as the mediator particles of the weak force, one of the four known fundamental forces responsible for the phenomenon of radioactivity and an essential ingredient to our Sun…

Around the one-year anniversary of the first COVID-19 lockdown in Switzerland, physicists and engineers working on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment closed the case on an elusive problem affecting the operation of the Hadron Calorimeter (…

Since the LHC first began colliding protons over ten years ago, CMS physicists have hoped to find evidence for one of the most popular and expansive theories of New Physics -- Supersymmetry.   The key idea of Supersymmetry (or “SUSY”) is…

The term 'flavor' was introduced by Murray Gell-Mann and his student Harald Fritzsch to describe the different types of quarks known at the time – up, down, and strange – the list of quark flavors grew to six. The term is adapted for the lepton…