Speaker
Description
The goal of LHCspin is to develop, in the next few years, innovative solutions and cutting-edge technologies to access spin physics in high-energy and high-intensity collisions of the LHC beam against a polarized fixed target.
This ambitious task poses its basis on the recent success of SMOG2, the unpolarized gas target installed in front of the LHCb spectrometer. SMOG2, already itself a unique project, will allow to carefully study the dynamics of the beam-target system, and clarify the potentiality for an innovative physics program at the LHC.
The forward geometry of the LHCb spectrometer (2<𝜂<5) is perfectly suited for the reconstruction of particles produced in fixed-target collisions. This configuration, with center-of-mass energies ranging from 115 GeV in pp interactions to 72 GeV in collisions with nuclear beams, allows to cover a wide backward rapidity region, including the poorly explored high-x regime, with unique probes.
With LHCspin, LHCb will become the first experiment delivering simultaneously unpolarized beam-beam collisions at √s=14 TeV and both polarized and unpolarized beam-target collisions.
The status of the project is presented along with a selection of physics opportunities.