Portal:Physics/Selected article/October 2007

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is one of two large general-purpose particle physics detectors being (as of 2007) built on the proton-proton Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland. Approximately 2600 people from 180 scientific institutes form the collaboration building it. It will be located in an underground chamber at Cessy in France, just across the border from Geneva. The completed detector will be cylindrical, 21 metres long and 16 metres diameter and weigh approximately 12,500 tonnes.

The main goals of the experiment are:
 * to explore physics at the TeV scale
 * to discover the Higgs boson
 * to look for evidence of physics beyond the standard model, such as supersymmetry, or extra dimensions
 * to study aspects of heavy ion collisions

''Image: The set up of the CMS. In the middle, under the so-called barrel there is a man for the scale. (HCAL=hadron calorimeter, ECAL=electromagnetic calorimeter)''