Moment of truth for CMS


One of the first events reconstructed in the Muon Drift Tubes, the Hadron Calorimeter and elements of the Silicon Tracker (TK) at 3 Tesla.

The atmosphere in the CMS control rooms was electric. Everbody was at the helm for the first full-scale testing of the experiment. This was a crunch moment for the entire collaboration. On Tuesday, 22 August the magnet attained almost its nominal power of 4 Tesla!

At the same moment, in a tiny improvised control room, the physicists were keyed up to test the entire detector system for the first time. The first cosmic ray tracks appeared on their screens in the week of 15 August.

The tests are set to continue for several weeks more until the first CMS components are lowered into their final positions in the cavern.