The spectra of strange hadrons are measured in proton-proton collisions, recorded by the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC, at centre-of-mass energies of 0.9 and 7 TeV. The K^0_s, Lambda, and Xi^- particles and their antiparticles are reconstructed from their decay topologies and the production rates are measured as functions of rapidity and transverse momentum. The results are compared to other experiments and to predictions of the PYTHIA Monte Carlo program. The transverse momentum distributions are found to differ substantially from the PYTHIA results and the production rates exceed the predictions by up to a factor of three.
The angular distributions and the differential branching fraction of the decay B0 to K*0(892) mu mu are studied using data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 20.5 inverse femtobarns collected with the CMS detector at the LHC in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV. From 1430 signal decays, the forward-backward asymmetry of the muons, the K*0(892) longitudinal polarization fraction, and the differential branching fraction are determined as a function of the dimuon invariant mass squared. The measurements are among the most precise to date and are in good agreement with standard model predictions.
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