About TOTEM

TOTEM experiment: its journey and discovery

The TOTEM experiment is designed to explore the proton interactions when they survive intact after the collisions. On this respect, special detectors have been placed far from the interaction points to detect a small angle detection, due by elastic and inelastic interactions. This is why this physics is known as the 'forward' physics that inaccessible by the other LHC experiments.

As CERN's 'longest' experiment, TOTEM detectors were spread across almost half a kilometre around the CMS interaction point. TOTEM had almost 3,000 kg of equipment, including four particle 'telescopes' as well as 26 'Roman pot' detectors.

The 'telescopes' – T1 and T2 – were cathode-strip chambers and Gas Electron Multipliers (GEM) to track the particles emerging from collisions at the CMS interaction point. Meanwhile, 'Roman Pots', named for their shape and first use by physicists from Rome in the 1970s, were performing measurements of scattered protons.

TOTEM data have been used to measure precisely the proton-proton cross section at different energies, from 900 GeV up to 13,6 TeV, either total, elastic and inelastic, giving also evidence of the existence of a gluon compound, called Odderon. The existence of such type of gluon compound is hidden in the QCD theory but was never seen before.

With the forward telescopes TOTEM measured the track density at small angles giving a calibration for all the ultra-high energy cosmic rays experiments.

Nowadays, TOTEM experiment has finished its measurement period and part of the hardware has been inherited by the CMS experiment and became the PPS (Protons Precision Spectrometer) forward detectors. In the transition period, TOTEM contributed in searches for beyond the standard model physics, such as anomalous quartic coupling with photons and dark matter.

Disclaimer

The open data are released under the Creative Commons CC0 waiver. Neither TOTEM nor CERN endorse any works, scientific or otherwise, produced using these data.

All released data samples will have a unique DOI that you are requested to cite in any applications or publications.