Researchers at the IIHE are participating to the CMS experiment since its beginning. The CMS IIHE group is honored by the price, it is a recognition of many years of very successful collaborative work.
The IIHE had a important role in the CMS tracker construction in early 2000, its deployment and detector response quality and monitoring.
The group prepared the data analysis using simulations, developing sophisticated tools to reconstruct the various particles in the CMS detector.
From 2010, the IIHE was heavily involved in the data analysis of the run1 (2010-2012), run 2 (2015-2018) and presently run3 (2022-2026). The analyses performed by the IIHE CMS group include: the discovery and study of the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson, precise measurement of the standard model parameters, the study of the top quark, the search for dark matter, the search for new particles expected from extension of the standard model.
Ultimate sensitivity is obtained thank to the development of cut of the edge analysis using for example sophisticated machine learning tools. In addition, the IIHE together with colleagues from UA, UG, and UCLouvain have the important responsibility to build one of the tracker endcaps for the high-luminosity phase of the LHC to start in 2030. At the IIHE, a 120 m2 clean room was specially built for the module production.
The first production batch of 7 modules has been released in March 2025. A total of 1500 tracker modules will be built at the IIHE during the 2 coming years.
Today, the CMS collaboration together with the ALICE, ATLAS and LHCb collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN were honored with the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.
The prize is awarded to the four collaborations, which unite thousands of researchers from more than 70 countries, and concerns the papers authored based on LHC Run-2 data up to July 2024. It was received by the spokespersons who led the collaborations during that time.