Benson T. Chertok Lecture: M. Chertok:The CMS Experiment at the CERN LHC: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) co-discovered the Higgs boson about a decade ago, revealing a brand-new fundamental interaction of nature. Since the discovery, CMS has conducted precision measurements of the Higgs boson's couplings to other particles and searched for rare decay modes to explore its properties. Current analyses, utilizing data from Run 2 and Run 3, address key questions, such as: are there additional Higgs Bosons? Does the Higgs couple to dark matter? What is the shape of the Higgs field potential? Even a decade after discovery, with sustained excellent collider and detector performance, these measurements remain statistics limited. To overcome this limitation, the High Luminosity LHC is under preparation, promising a significantly more detailed understanding of such key phenomena. This upgrade includes a state-of-the-art silicon pixel and strip tracking detector currently under construction at CMS. In this talk, after personal remembrances of Benson T. Chertok and his Ph.D. advisor Edward Booth, I will discuss the Higgs discovery, recent results, and the prospects for the coming years in collider particle physics.