EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH AT THE ENERGY FRONTIER IN HIGH ENERGY PHYSICS WITH THE CMS EXPERIMENT

We present the research program of the University of Florida’s experimental hadron collider group at the CMS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. The program builds on the group’s strengths, expands previous areas of research into new directions, and opens up altogether new areas of research. The program consists of service, computing and operation tasks; of detector upgrade projects; and of analyses of the 13 TeV data during LHC's second running period.

The service and operation tasks include operations and maintenance of the Endcap muon system Cathode Strip Chambers (CSC), their high-voltage system, CSC local data reconstruction, and the corresponding data quality monitoring. Also included are management of the CMS Level-1 trigger operations and maintenance and operations of the CSC trigger. University of Florida’s Tier-2 computing center supports computing, software and datasets for CMS physicists.

The upgrade projects include the Endcap muon trigger for the initial LHC upgrades, the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) track trigger, the track-muon correlator trigger, the high-voltage system for the GEM detectors, and R&D on the CSC longevity in the context of their operation at the higher luminosities expected during the upcoming decade.

The central physics program for the University of Florida's CMS group with the LHC data includes: a Higgs boson physics component

(measurements and searches)

, a SUSY searches component, searches for other physics beyond the Standard Model, and various official coordination roles.