ICHEP 2020

28 July 2020 to 6 August 2020
virtual conference
Europe/Prague timezone

Detecting and studying high-energy neutrinos with FASERnu at the LHC

29 Jul 2020, 16:30
15m
virtual conference

virtual conference

Talk 02. Neutrino Physics

Speaker

Dr Akitaka Ariga (Universitaet Bern (CH))

Description

FASER, the Forward Search Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is an experiment aiming to search for light, weakly-interacting new particles. The particle detector will be located 480 m downstream of the ATLAS interaction point. In addition to searches for new particles, we proposed a new detector (FASER$\nu$) to study neutrinos at the highest man-made energies and got approval by the CERN Research Board in December 2019. To date, neutrino cross-section data exist up to a few 100 GeV with accelerator-based neutrino beams. With FASER$\nu$, the neutrino cross-sections will be measured in the currently unexplored energy range between a few 100 GeV and 6 TeV. In particular, electron-neutrino and tau-neutrino cross sections will be measured at the highest energy ever. Furthermore, the channels associated with heavy quark (charm and beauty) production could be studied. As a feasibility study, we performed a test run in 2018 at the proposed detector location with a 30-kg lead/tungsten emulsion detector and collected data of 12.5 fb$^{-1}$. By analyzing the data, we selected several neutrino interaction candidates and are performing a multivariate analysis for the separation from the background towards a first detection of neutrinos at the LHC. From 2021 to 2023 (2024) during Run 3 of the LHC, we will deploy an emulsion detector with a target mass of 1.2 tons, possibly coupled with the FASER magnetic spectrometer, which would yield roughly 1,300 $\nu_e$, 20,000 $\nu_{\mu}$, and 20 $\nu_{\tau}$ interacting in the detector. Here, we present an overview and the status of the FASER$\nu$ program, as well as the analysis for the neutrino detection in the 2018 data.

Primary author

Dr Akitaka Ariga (Universitaet Bern (CH))