In the recently published paper in Physical Review D, the FASER experimental collaboration has announced the observation of the first neutrino candidate events ever seen at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Among the initiators of this experiment was our colleague, Dr. Sebastian Trojanowski, from the Particle Astrophysics group in AstroCeNT.
The international team of physicists led by Prof. Jonathan L. Feng (University of California, Irvine) and Dr. Jamie Boyd (CERN) has just published a study about the measurement of a few neutrino candidate events. This has been obtained with a small pilot emulsion detector, a box of a size of 10-20cm, placed in the far-forward region of the LHC for only several weeks during the previous run of the collider. The results obtained this way are a striking illustration of the power of this new neutrino measurement method, which employs an extremely collimated flux of far-forward neutrinos produced at the LHC.
During the upcoming LHC Run 3, the FASER collaboration is expected to collect thousands of neutrino-induced events and study their interactions in detail in a dedicated larger emulsion detector FASERnu. This will also help to better understand the nature of far-forward proton-proton collisions with implications for quantum chromodynamics and cosmic-ray physics. Given the very broad and promising prospects of this new physics program at the LHC, it has also been proposed to significantly extend it towards the future in a dedicated Forward Physics Facility. Discussions about this are ongoing with the input from the SiPM Systems for Astroparticle Physics and Medical Physics group at AstroCeNT led by Dr. Marcin Kuźniak. Stay tuned!
links:
artice in PRD: https://journals.aps.org/prd/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevD.104.L091101
Press release: https://phys.org/news/2021-11-physicists-neutrinos-large-hadron-collider.html
Photo: CERN
