Speaker
Description
Many neutrons with high energies of several TeV are produced in the zero-degree region of LHC collisions, and a precise measurement of these neutrons is important to study several soft-QCD processes like one-pion exchange. A joint operation of the LHCf and ATLAS experiments including the ZDC detectors has been performed with proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13.6 TeV in September 2022. Three hadronic modules of the ZDC detectors were installed behind each LHCf detector, and approximately 300 M events were corrected successfully.
In this presentation, we report about a performance study of the LHCf and ZDC joint operation evaluated using 350 GeV/c proton beams at CERN-SPS in 2021. The detectors were aligned to the beam line similar to the operation configuration at LHC. A proton induced a hadronic shower in the LHCf detector, and a part of shower particles leaked out from LHCf were detected by the ZDC modules. The summation of energy deposit in both the detectors after some corrections was used as an energy estimator for hadronic showers, and we confirmed the energy resolution of 19%, which is much better than that of the LHCf-standalone measurement, 40%.
