Probing elementary particles at the CMS experiment

The CMS experiment at the CERN LHC is designed to study elementary particles, within the framework of the Standard Model as well as beyond. The discovery of the Higgs boson of mass of 125 GeV by the CMS and ATLAS Collaborations in 2012 marks a stellar success of the LHC physics program. Despite its huge success, the SM is known to be inadequate to explain stability of Higgs mass, dark matter, matter–antimatter asymmetry, and masses of the neutrinos, to name a few. Since the beginning of the LHC operations more than a decade ago, the CMS Collaboration has reported many measurements of the SM processes and searches for new physics in proton–proton collisions at √(s) = 7, 8 and 13 TeV. It also studies collisions of heavy ions. The large and complex experiment requires intense collaboration of a large team of dedicated researchers to infer physics from the data collected. Indian participants in the CMS experiment have made significant contributions to several key areas of detector development, experimental operations, and physics analysis programs. Given the collaborative nature of these efforts, it is not possible to isolate the contributions of individual countries or researchers. It is also not possible to discuss all the physics results published by the collaboration. In this article contributed to the special issue about India and the CERN, we present an overview of the physics program of the CMS Collaboration and discuss a few key results picked by the authors with slight preference given to those with significant contributions from Indian physicists.