The Long Journey to the Higgs Boson and Beyond at the LHC Part I: Emphasis on CMS

Since 2010 there has been a rich harvest of results on standard model physics by the ATLAS and CMS experiments operating on the Large Hadron Collider. In the summer of 2012, a spectacular discovery was made by these experiments of a new, heavy particle. All the subsequently analysed data point strongly to the properties of this particle as those expected for the Higgs boson associated with the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism postulated to explain the spontaneous symmetry breaking in the electroweak sector, thereby explaining how elementary particles acquire mass. This article focuses on the CMS experiment, the technological challenges encountered in its construction, describing some of the physics results obtained so far, including the discovery of the Higgs boson, and searches for the widely anticipated new physics beyond the standard model, and peer into the future involving the high-luminosity phase of the LHC. This article is complementary to the one by Peter Jenni that focuses on the ATLAS experiment.