Physics (Internal)

Life story of a MegaScience Experiment: CMS from infancy to maturity, why it is the way it is? How will it evolve?

This event is part of the HEE Seminar Series.

In 1990 four physicists met over lunch to discuss a possible experiment for the proton-proton collider being proposed at CERN. They could hardly envisage that those initial ideas would yield one of the first Megascience projects ever, the CMS experiment, assembling more than 2000 researchers from all over the world to contribute in an unprecedented way to increasing our knowledge of the inner workings of Nature.

I will detail the scientific goals which drove the initial design of the CMS detector and will show how the apparatus continues to evolve to fully exploit the original investment and to expand the physics frontier attainable by the CERN accelerator complex. If time permits, I may also play an “Ode to LHC Collisions”, recently scored to the visualization of real events.