Since the initial data taking of the CERN LHC, the CMS experiment has undergone substantial upgrades and improvements. This paper discusses the CMS detector as it is configured for the third data-taking period of the CERN LHC, Run 3, which started in 2022. The entire silicon pixel tracking detector was replaced. A new powering system for the superconducting solenoid was installed. The electronics of the hadron calorimeter was upgraded. All the muon electronic systems were upgraded, and new muon detector stations were added, including a gas electron multiplier detector. The precision proton spectrometer was upgraded. The dedicated luminosity detectors and the beam loss monitor were refurbished. Substantial improvements to the trigger, data acquisition, software, and computing systems were also implemented, including a new hybrid CPU/GPU farm for the high-level trigger.

This paper describes the Combine software package used for statistical analyses by the CMS Collaboration. The package, originally designed to perform searches for a Higgs boson and the combined analysis of those searches, has evolved to become the statistical analysis tool presently used in the majority of measurements and searches performed by the CMS Collaboration. It is not specific to the CMS experiment, and this paper is intended to serve as a reference for users outside of the CMS Collaboration, providing an outline of the most salient features and capabilities. Readers are provided with the possibility to run Combine and reproduce examples provided in this paper using a publicly available container image. Since the package is constantly evolving to meet the demands of ever-increasing data sets and analysis sophistication, this paper cannot cover all details of Combine. However, the online documentation referenced within this paper provides an up-to-date and complete user guide.

The CERN LHC provided proton and heavy ion collisions during its Run 2 operation period from 2015 to 2018. Proton-proton collisions reached a peak instantaneous luminosity of 2.1× 10³⁴ cm^-2s^-1, twice the initial design value, at √(s)=13 TeV. The CMS experiment records a subset of the collisions for further processing as part of its online selection of data for physics analyses, using a two-level trigger system: the Level-1 trigger, implemented in custom-designed electronics, and the high-level trigger, a streamlined version of the offline reconstruction software running on a large computer farm. This paper presents the performance of the CMS high-level trigger system during LHC Run 2 for physics objects, such as leptons, jets, and missing transverse momentum, which meet the broad needs of the CMS physics program and the challenge of the evolving LHC and detector conditions. Sophisticated algorithms that were originally used in offline reconstruction were deployed online. Highlights include a machine-learning b tagging algorithm and a reconstruction algorithm for tau leptons that decay hadronically.

A search for decays to invisible particles of Higgs bosons produced in association with a top-antitop quark pair or a vector boson, which both decay to a fully hadronic final state, has been performed using proton-proton collision data collected at $${\sqrt{s}=13\,\text {Te}\hspace{-.08em}\text {V}}$$s = 13 Te V by the CMS experiment at the LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138 $$\,\text {fb}^{-1}$$fb - 1 . The 95% confidence level upper limit set on the branching fraction of the 125 $$\,\text {Ge}\hspace{-.08em}\text {V}$$Ge V Higgs boson to invisible particles, $${\mathcal {B}({\textrm{H}} \rightarrow \text {inv})}$$B ( H → inv ) , is 0.54 (0.39 expected), assuming standard model production cross sections. The results of this analysis are combined with previous $${\mathcal {B}({\textrm{H}} \rightarrow \text {inv})}$$B ( H → inv ) searches carried out at $${\sqrt{s}=7}$$s = 7 , 8, and 13 $$\,\text {Te}\hspace{-.08em}\text {V}$$Te V in complementary production modes. The combined upper limit at 95% confidence level on $${\mathcal {B}({\textrm{H}} \rightarrow \text {inv})}$$B ( H → inv ) is 0.15 (0.08 expected).