Driving the design, implementation and development of the CMS detector and computing systems is the urge to understand the way that matter and forces work at the smallest scales imaginable. Being a “general purpose” detector, the CMS experiment is built to extract as much information as possible from the particle collisions that take place at its centre. Different teams of physicists examine the data in different ways to learn different things about the underlying physics; but all are united by a common desire to understand Nature at the fundamental level.

Members of the Imperial College CMS group are involved in the following physics analyses:

• The Standard Model of Particle Physics at the LHC;
• The Higgs Boson - the final piece of our particle puzzle found in 2012;
• Supersymmetry and Exotic physics - the hunt for new physics beyond the standard model.

Underpinning all of these analyses is the work that goes into reconstructing and identifying individual particles from the detector output and the calibration of the apparatus.