Seminars

Akitaka Ariga: “The FASER experiment: from first studies of collider neutrinos to searches of light, weakly interacting particles at the LHC”

Europe/London
Description

The FASER experiment is a new experiment at the Large Hadron Collier (LHC). The experiment consists of two pillars, FASER to search for light, weakly-interacting new particles, and FASERnu to study neutrinos for the first time with a collider.
A copious number of particles, including neutrinos and hypothetical dark particles, are expected to be produced following p-p collisions at the LHC. Most of them are emitted in far forward direction, where the conventional LHC experiments do not have a coverage. The FASER collaboration will place a series of particle detectors at the 480 m downstream of the ATLAS interaction point, on-axis of the beam collisions. We will take data in Run 3 of the LHC operation (2022-2024, ~150 fb^-1). With a 1-ton scale neutrino detector, we expect O(10^4) neutrino charged-current interactions including three neutrino flavors at TeV energy scale, allowing a study of neutrinos in an currently unexplored energy regime. Most of the detectors have been installed and being commissioned towards the data taking in next year.
This seminar covers the overview and physics sensitivities of the FASER experiment, also the first neutrino interaction candidates from a pilot run in 2018.