Recent Results of the CMS Experiment

TL;DR

The CMS experiment analyzed 2011 LHC data, setting limits on the Higgs boson mass, observing a potential signal near 124 GeV, and exploring supersymmetry and rare decays, with results guiding future research directions.

Contribution

This paper reports the first combined results from CMS on Higgs searches, supersymmetry constraints, and rare decay limits using 2011 data, highlighting potential signals and setting new bounds.

Findings

Possible Higgs signal at 124 GeV with 3.1 sigma local significance

Set new limits on supersymmetric particle parameters

Achieved the tightest limits on rare Bs and Bd decays to muons

Abstract

The CMS collaboration has recently produced results of a number of searches for new physics processes using data collected during the 2011 run of the Large Hadron Collider. Up to 5 inverse femtobarns of proton-proton collisions at 7 TeV centre-of-mass energy have been used to search for the standard model Higgs boson in five different decay modes, divided in 42 independent sub-channels. The combination of the results has allowed CMS to set 95% confidence-level limits on the Higgs boson mass, constraining it to lay in the region 114.4<M(H)<127 GeV or M(H)>600 GeV. An excess of events with a local significance of 3.1 standard deviations is observed for M(H)=124 GeV; the global significance of observing such an effect anywhere in the search range 110-600 GeV is estimated to be 1.5 standard deviations. A number of signatures of supersymmetric particles have also been investigated, significantly restricting the parameter space of natural low-scale theories. A search for the rare decays of neutral bottom mesons to muon pairs, Bs to mu mu and Bd to mu mu, has achieved the tightest limits to date, and is approaching the sensitivity to measure the standard model branching ratios. As it happens, though, the highly informative results extracted from 2011 data produce more questions than answers; this doubles expectations for the 2012 run of LHC, which will conclusively answer several of them.