For the past two years, teams from the CMS collaboration, many from distant countries, have been hard at work at Point 5 at Cessy. Their goal: to ensure that the CMS detector will be able to handle the improved performance of the LHC when it starts operations at higher energy and luminosity. This effort involved intense and spectacular activity – from movements of the 1500-tonne endcap modules to the installation of the delicate pixel tracker. In this article, Austin Ball looks back at the vast amount of work done during LS1 and some of the challenges that arose along the way.
Read more: "Chronicles of CMS: the saga of LS1" – CERN Courier