CMS experiment

The Compact Muon Solenoid is a general-purpose particle detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. It records proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions to study particles and fundamental interactions.

Solenoid: A coil of wire that produces a magnetic field when electric current passes through it. CMS’s superconducting solenoid bends charged particles so their momenta can be measured.
Higgs boson: An elementary boson associated with the Higgs field, whose interactions give mass to elementary particles. CMS was one of the two experiments that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012.
Large Hadron Collider: A particle accelerator at CERN that collides protons and heavy ions at high energies. The LHC supplies the collisions that CMS records and analyzes.
ATLAS experiment: A general-purpose particle detector at the Large Hadron Collider, independent of CMS and designed for broad discovery physics. ATLAS provides an independent measurement of many phenomena also studied by CMS.
Silicon tracker: A detector that uses silicon sensors to record the paths of charged particles. Its measurements reconstruct charged-particle tracks near the collision point.
Higgs boson discovery: The 2012 observation of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. CMS reported the discovery jointly with ATLAS using collision data from the LHC.
Proton-proton collision: A high-energy encounter between two protons, in which their constituent quarks and gluons interact. Most CMS data come from proton-proton collisions at the LHC.
Toroidal magnetic field: A magnetic field shaped around a torus, commonly produced by coils arranged around a detector. ATLAS relies on large toroidal magnets, unlike CMS’s central solenoid design.
Electromagnetic calorimeter: A detector that measures the energy of electrons and photons through electromagnetic showers. CMS uses lead tungstate crystals to measure electrons and photons precisely.
Top quark: The most massive known elementary particle, a quark with electric charge +2/3. Its high mass and varied decay patterns make it a major subject of CMS measurements.

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