Experimental HEP Seminar

Status and Potential of the CMS Experiment

Dominique Fortin

University of California, Riverside

The CMS Experiment comprises one of two large multipurpose detectors under construction at CERN. The CMS detector is in its final construction phase; the lowering of the detector's rings down to the experimental cavern began last November and commissioning of the detector is scheduled for late 2007, in time for the first collisions at the LHC. In this presentation, I will first give an overview of the various components of the CMS detector and describe their performance in testbeams and recent cosmic muon studies. I will then summarize some of the physics studies which are to be carried by CMS, but will focus mostly on the potential discovery of the elusive Standard Model Higgs boson. In particular, the search of the Higgs boson decaying to four leptons, the so-called golden channel, is of primary interest since it can be observed over a wide range of invariant masses, and also allows for the measurement of the Higgs boson properties.