The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is a large particle physics detector being (2003) built on the proton-proton Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland. Approximately 2300 people from 159 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 12500 tonnes.
The main goals of the experiment are:
- The discovery of the Higgs boson
- To look for evidence of supersymmetry
- To be able to study aspects of heavy ion collisions
The name highlights features of the detector:
- Its relatively small size
- The powerful solenoid
- Its optimization for tracking muons
Like most particle physics detectors, CMS has a large solenoid. This allows the charge/mass ratio of particles to be determined from the curved track that they follow in the magnetic field. It is 13 metres long and 6 metres in diameter, and its refrigerated superconducting niobium-titanium coils will produce a 4 tesla magnetic field.
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