Two Undergrads, One Conference, and 5,280 Feet of Physics The beautiful state of Colorado, home to mountains, skiing, South Park, and plenty of scientific energy, set the stage for this year’s APS Global Physics Summit in Denver. Our group was…
Last weekend, on Saturday March 7th, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN for the first time in 2026 reached the Stable Beams conditions during proton-proton collisions at 13.6 TeV energy. The beams are declared “stable” when all parts of the…
On November 4th at 22:10 the last 2025 proton-proton run of the LHC came to a close. As can be seen on the picture below, the LHC in the first third of the data taking fell a little behind the…
LHC must have been in a mood to test the limits. According to reports from our data acquisition team CMS recorded pileup collisions at an average of 135 per crossing which is about two times as much we have been…
April 14, 2025 was the day when we had the first proton beams of 2025 through the LHC and leaving some recordable beam splashes! Oh, yeah … LHC and CMS are ready! A beam splash simply means that protons crash…
A muon, the heavier counterpart of the electron, serves as one of the clearest signatures of various unique and interesting processes at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Due to its small interaction cross-section with ordinary matter, a muon can pass…
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…
