Featuring doctoral candidates from various universities around the world, the Compact Muon Solenoid Data Analysis School (CMSDAS) was held at CERN from February 13 to 18. The school’s aim was the development and optimisation of techniques and algorithms to facilitate the analysis of data received from the CMS experiment, so that the so-called 'experiment of the century’ – which, along with the ATLAS experiment, recently contributed to discovering the Higgs particle – can be ready to analyse events in higher energies by 2015.

The CMS experiment has been built to “search for new physics”, and its overarching goal is to investigate a wide range of physics mysteries, including the search for extra dimensions and the Higgs boson – also known as the ‘God particle.’ The CMSDAS consisted of 8 teams of 8-10 students each, including two University of Cyprus (UCY) doctoral candidates in Physics, Emilios Ioannou and Ioannis Vasilas who belonged to the team studying the decay of the Higgs particle into four leptons. The two scientists’ outstanding analysis on true events landed them the top spot at the CMSDAS following evaluation by an international scientific committee.

Besides the two Cypriot physicists, members of the winning team were Jennifer Ngadiuba (University of Zurich), Christophe Goetzmann (Hubert Curien Institute), Aidan Sean Randle-Condle (University of Brussels) and Michal Olszewski (University of Warsaw).

Source: Cyprus Mail