Teachers and Students

This is the dawn of an exciting age of new discovery in the study of elementary particles and their interactions. The current theoretical framework of the fundamental nature of matter, known as the Standard Model, explains much, but leaves many unanswered questions. What is dark matter? What happened to antimatter? Are there extra dimensions of spacetime? Are there new symmetries of nature? Are there new, as yet unobserved, forces? What is responsible for mass? The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a huge scientific instrument at CERN, provides the highest-energy particle collisions produced in a laboratory to six experiments that hold the potential to answer these questions.

Event of the Week, 12/13/2011: Photon pair in CMS

This is a typical candidate event in which a possible Higgs decays into two photons. The two high-energy photons (depicted by red towers) are measured in the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter. The yellow lines are the measured tracks of other particles produced in the collision. Events like this are part of the data set that, as it grows, will help physicists to discover or to rule out the Standard Model Higgs. Copyright CERN on behalf of the CMS Collaboration.

Event of the Week images are hosted on Flickr.