After the initial proton-proton reference run has been completed reasonably smoothly CMS is now really logging Heavy Ion collisions. As usual in those relatively short periods the CMS control room in Meyrin is full of the Heavy Ion folks. This…
Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (MAPS) represent cutting-edge technology in high-resolution, low-material budget detectors, pivotal for particle physics applications. Our group is preparing to leverage this technology for vertex detection in a future FCC experiment. In parallel, our colleagues at MIT,…
CMS has a rich heavy-ion physics program covering measurement of jet quenching, quarkonium suppression, heavy flavor, flow correlations, and forward physics. Many of the physics goals involve rare probes of the quark-gluon plasma that rely on large data samples. The…
My recent visit to CERN would have been sufficiently motivated by the CMS week, but I was not sure whether I should go because it was in the middle of the semester and I do not like to leave the…
First proton beams are in the machine for this year, 2024. It is always an exciting moment, even if we have done this for many many years already. To get a machine with 1232 dipole magnets and even more focusing…
November 1, 2023 was the day that our own Nergis Mavalvala, our Dean came to CERN for the first time. Bolek the director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science had invited her and she accepted, curious as we learned during…
The LHC program for this year will be concluded with one month of Heavy Ion (PbPb) collisions. It enables us to study the properties of matter in extreme conditions (a trillion times denser than the core of the sun) and…
After the usual one month heavy ion run of the LHC was canceled due to energy cost issues and the not that smooth startup of the LHC at least there was one day reserved to set up heavy ions and…
