CMS - The Compact Muon Solenoid
The Compact Muon Solenoid is one of the experiments for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The collaboration involves about 1870 scientists coming from 150 Institutions distributed in 31 Nations.
The acronym CMS stands for “Compact Muon Solenoid”.
The name well summarises the main characteristics of the experimental apparatus: great emphasis has been put on building a highly efficient muon detection and measurement system, and the detector is based around the use of a single superconducting solenoid.
Most detectors for particle physics are based around a magnet system, to facilitate the measurement of the momenta of charged particles. CMS will use a large superconducting Solenoid, with a length of around 12m and an inner diameter of about 6m. The field strength will be 4 Tesla - about 100000 times that of the earths magnetic field. This will be the largest magnet of its type ever constructed, and allows all of the tracking devices and calorimetry to be placed inside the coil of the solenoid - resulting in a compact overall detector.
In the CMS outreach pages you will learn about the different parts of the detector, you'll be able to watch a movie and interesting animations of the final assembly of the detector, and you will also find out some interesting (and sometimes amazing!) facts about the CMS detector.
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