The LHC smashes groups of protons together at close to the speed of light: 40million times per second and with seven times the energy of the most powerfulaccelerators built up to now. Many of these will just be glancing blows butsome will be head on collisions and very energetic. When this happens some ofthe energy of the collision is turned into mass and previously unobserved,short-lived particles – which could give clues about how Nature behaves at afundamental level - fly out and into the detector. Our work includes the experimentaldiscovery of theHiggs boson, which lead to theaward of a Nobel prize for the underlying theory that predicted the Higgs bosonas an important piece of the standard model theory of particle physics.
CMS is a particle detector that is designed to see a wide range of particlesand phenomena produced in high-energy collisions in the LHC. Like a cylindricalonion, different layers of detectors measure the different particles, and usethis key data to build up a picture of events at the heart of the collision.
Many of CMS Software components (CMSSW) arehosted onGithub. You can find here afew FAQand tutorials on how develop in CMSSW.