We perform particle physics experiments at colliders with the highest energies and luminosities, in order to address fundamental questions such as the mechanism behind electroweak symmetry breaking or the existence of new particles and forces at the TeV energy scale. Currently this is pursued by a leading participation in the Compact Muon Solenoid (external page CMS) experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), with particular focus on the studies of the Higgs boson, on novel machine learning tools for data analysis, and on significant contributions to the Phase-2 upgrades (electromagnetic barrel calorimeter electronics and precision timing layer).
The future priorities will revolve around the successful completion of the CMS detector upgrades, the subsequent exploitation of the High-Luminosity LHC data taking phase and contributions to establishing the grounds for the next large collider project at CERN.

We also perform detector research and development, with possible spin-offs. Besides the activities around the electronics upgrades of the CMS crystal calorimeter and its detector control system, together with R&D on radiation-hard scintillators, during the last decade another important research line has been created, namely the development of novel Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanners for (bio-)medical imaging applications. In the context of the Small Animal Fast Insert for mRi (SAFIR) project, a pre-clinical PET insert for a Magnetic Resonance (MR) scanner has been developed with unprecedented rate capabilities and timing resolution, thus allowing quantitative dynamic PET imaging simultaneously with the MR sequences. Furthermore, the design and development of a very cost-effective clinical brain PET scanner, for large-scale population scanning towards early diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases, has led to the founding of an ETH spin-off company (external page Positrigo AG). In the future, R&D on novel PET technologies will continue, together with exploring further applications of our brain scanner (PETITION project).

Finally, we are very much dedicated to the teaching of physics to ETH students and to the promotion of public awareness of fundamental research.