The Cylindrical Onion brings you the latest from the CMS Experiment at CERN. All views expressed by the bloggers are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by the CMS Collaboration.

Why "Cylindrical Onion"?

CMS is described as "… a particle detector that is designed to see a wide range of particles and phenomena produced in high-energy collisions in the LHC. Like a cylindrical onion, different layers of detectors measure the different particles, and use this key data to build up a picture of events at the heart of the collision."

The image below shows the CMS detector design. The LHC beams travel in opposite directions along the central axis of the CMS cylinder colliding in the middle of the CMS detector.