Freya Blekman is CMS voice of May 2016

03/05/2016 - 11:15

The @CMSvoices project allows members of the public to engage with members of the CMS Collaboration via Twitter.  Every month, a CMS physicist takes control of the CMSvoices twitter account and talks about their work and everything to do with life at CMS. In May 2016, the month the accelerator starts taking data at unprecedented intensities, the CMS voice is VUB professor Freya Blekman.

In 2015 the LHC has restarted at 13 TeV energy, and the design parameters are expected to be achieved in 2016. The searches for possible new physical phenomena are currently in full swing and the VUB group is continuing its leading role in the CMS collaboration. Prof. Blekman's research interests include the search for new physics, such as supersymmetry (SUSY), using precision measurements and direct searches with a focus on new particles that transform into top quarks after being produced. She has led many research teams at CERN and CMS, including the Beyond-Two-Generations (B2G) Physics Analysis Group of CMS. Prof. Blekman leads a team of postdocs and graduate students that works in the VUB Strategic Research Program "High-Energy Physics" at the Interuniversity Institute for High Energies, IIHE (ULB-VUB), the physics of elementary particles institute that was created in 1972 at the initiative of the academic authorities of both the Université Libre de Bruxelles and Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

The CMS Collaboration at CERN, named after the Compact Muon Solenoid detector, is one of the largest international scientific collaborations in history, involving over 4000 particle physicists, engineers, technicians, students and support staff from around 200 universities and institutes from more than 40 countries.​ The VUB CMS group is one of the founding institutes in the collaboration, and has held many leadership roles in the experiment, at the moment for example the elected presidency of the collaboration's parlement by Prof. Jorgen D'Hondt. The CMS detector is one of two general-purpose detectors at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that have been built to search for new physics. CMS is designed to detect a wide range of particles and phenomena produced in the LHC’s high-energy proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions.