Experimental High Energy Physics

Everything, including ourselves, is made of matter whose underlying structure is governed by basic laws. The goal of high energy physics is the understanding of the elementary particles which are the fundamental constituents of matter. The fabulous success of the Standard Model has given us a framework for interpretation of most particle interactions, but it has also created a foundation from which we can begin to explore a deeper level of issues such as the origin of mass, the preponderance of matter over antimatter in the Universe, the identity of "dark matter," the physics of the Big Bang, and the microscopic structure of space-time. These searches require the development of new detectors that are often massive, some using high energy particle accelerators many kilometres in diameter. One example is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which is being built at CERN, the European research laboratory in Switzerland. It will be operational in 2008 and will probe deeper into matter than ever before. The IPM/CMS group is involved in building
the experiments and evaluating the potential discovery of different signals in CMS which is one of two main experiments in LHC at CERN.