Photo of the CMS group members (June 2025)

Our group is also represented on Instagram: have a look!

Welcome to the CMS group at DESY!

We work at the CMS experiment running at the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The CMS Detector is one of the most complex and precise scientific instruments ever constructed. It was built and is run by an international collaboration of over 200 institutes from more than 40 countries. In Germany, we have four CMS groups in different institutes: RWTH Aachen, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Hamburg University and DESY. The DESY CMS group with about 90 members is the largest German institute.

Here at DESY, we engage in activities ranging from physics analysis and contributions to data taking (monitoring and alignment) to detector hardware projects. Physics topics are addressed in the areas Top Quarks, Higgs, SUSY and Dark Matter Searches, QCD, as well as studies for parton density distributions in the proton. We also work on data quality monitoring, tracker alignment, high level trigger, the CASTOR calorimeter, the beam condition monitoring as well as research and development for the tracker upgrade. DESY is also a Tier-2-site and thus directly involved in the LHC-computing for the data processing chain.

The DESY CMS group offers diverse opportunities for Diploma, Masters and PhD theses both in physics analysis and in more technical areas. If you are interested, please have a look at our open projects and/or contact our group leaders (see info box on the right).