The Antwerp group is a founding member of the CMS Collaboration. Over the years, about 50 scientists and engineers from Antwerp participated in CMS. At present, the group consists of two professors, two postdocs, four PhD students and one engineer.
The group contributed to the R&D and construction of the first CMS Tracker endcap, as well as the very forward CASTOR calorimeter of CMS. Together with the other Belgian institutes, the Antwerp group also engaged itself in building a new Tracker endcap for the Phase-2 Upgrade of CMS.
The physics interests of the group members lie in the study of the strong interaction and the structure of hadrons, in the search and exploration of the Higgs boson and the search for beyond-the-Standard-Model phenomena. The achievements in physics analysis that the group is most proud of are the investigation of the underlying event in proton-proton collisions, the study of the Higgs boson through its decays to two W bosons, and the use of forward jets in vector-boson-fusion processes.