FASER, or the Forward Search Experiment, is a new experiment at CERN designed to complement the LHC’s ongoing physics program, extending its discovery potential to light and weakly interacting particles that may be produced copiously at the LHC in the far-forward region. New particles targeted by FASER, such as long-lived dark photons or axion-like particles, are characterised by a signature with two oppositely charged tracks or two photons in the multi-TeV range that emanate from a common vertex inside the detector. The full detector was successfully installed in March 2021 in an LHC side tunnel 480 m downstream from the interaction point in the ATLAS detector. FASER is planned to be operational for LHC Run 3. The experiment is composed of a silicon-strip tracking-based spectrometer using three dipole magnets with a 20 cm aperture, supplemented by four scintillator stations and an electromagnetic calorimeter. The FASER electromagnetic calorimeter is constructed from four spare LHCb calorimeter modules. The modules are of the Shashlik type with interleaved scintillator and lead plates that result in 25 radiation lengths and 1% energy resolution for TeV electromagnetic showers. In 2021, a test beam campaign was carried out using one of the CERN SPS beam lines to set up the calibration of the FASER calorimeter system in preparation for physics data taking. The relative calorimeter response to electrons with energies between 10 and 300 GeV, as well as high energy muons and pions, has been measured under various high voltage settings and beam positions. The measured calorimeter resolution, energy calibration, and particle identification capabilities are presented.
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Effect of the high-level trigger for detecting long-lived particles at LHCb
Long-lived particles (LLPs) show up in many extensions of the Standard Model, but they are challenging to search for with current detectors, due to their very displaced vertices. This study evaluated the ability of the trigger algorithms used in the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment to detect long-lived particles and attempted to adapt them to enhance the sensitivity of this experiment to undiscovered long-lived particles. A model with a Higgs portal to a dark sector is tested, and the sensitivity reach is discussed. In the LHCb tracking system, the farthest tracking station from the collision point is the scintillating fiber tracker, the SciFi detector. One of the challenges in the track reconstruction is to deal with the large amount of and combinatorics of hits in the LHCb detector. A dedicated algorithm has been developed to cope with the large data output. When fully implemented, this algorithm would greatly increase the available statistics for any long-lived particle search in the forward region and would additionally improve the sensitivity of analyses dealing with Standard Model particles of large lifetime, such as K S 0 or Λ 0 hadrons.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1904160
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10402924
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Frontiers in Big Data
- Volume:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 2624-909X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Particles beyond the Standard Model (SM) can generically have lifetimes that are long compared to SM particles at the weak scale. When produced at experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, these long-lived particles (LLPs) can decay far from the interaction vertex of the primary proton–proton collision. Such LLP signatures are distinct from those of promptly decaying particles that are targeted by the majority of searches for new physics at the LHC, often requiring customized techniques to identify, for example, significantly displaced decay vertices, tracks with atypical properties, and short track segments. Given their non-standard nature, a comprehensive overview of LLP signatures at the LHC is beneficial to ensure that possible avenues of the discovery of new physics are not overlooked. Here we report on the joint work of a community of theorists and experimentalists with the ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb experiments—as well as those working on dedicated experiments such as MoEDAL, milliQan, MATHUSLA, CODEX-b, and FASER—to survey the current state of LLP searches at the LHC, and to chart a path for the development of LLP searches into the future, both in the upcoming Run 3 and at the high-luminosity LHC. The work is organized around the current and future potential capabilities of LHC experiments to generally discover new LLPs, and takes a signature-based approach to surveying classes of models that give rise to LLPs rather than emphasizing any particular theory motivation. We develop a set of simplified models; assess the coverage of current searches; document known, often unexpected backgrounds; explore the capabilities of proposed detector upgrades; provide recommendations for the presentation of search results; and look towards the newest frontiers, namely high-multiplicity ‘dark showers’, highlighting opportunities for expanding the LHC reach for these signals.
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null (Ed.)A bstract The search for long-lived particles (LLP) is an exciting physics opportunity in the upcoming runs of the Large Hadron Collider. In this paper, we focus on a new search strategy of using the High Granularity Calorimeter (HGCAL), part of the upgrade of the CMS detector, in such searches. In particular, we demonstrate that the high granularity of the calorimeter allows us to see “shower tracks” in the calorimeter, and can play a crucial role in identifying the signal and suppressing the background. We study the potential reach of the HGCAL using a signal model in which the Standard Model Higgs boson decays into a pair of LLPs, h → XX . After carefully estimating the Standard Model QCD and the misreconstructed fake-track backgrounds, we give the projected reach for both an existing vector boson fusion trigger and a novel displaced-track-based trigger. Our results show that the best reach for the Higgs decay branching ratio, BR( h → XX ), in the vector boson fusion channel is about $$ \mathcal{O} $$ O (10 − 4 ) with lifetime cτ X ∼ 0 . 1–1 meters, while for the gluon gluon fusion channel it is about $$ \mathcal{O} $$ O (10 − 5 –10 − 6 ) for similar lifetimes. For longer lifetime cτ X ∼ 10 3 meters, our search could probe BR( h → XX ) down to a few × 10 − 4 (10 − 2 ) in the gluon gluon fusion (vector boson fusion) channels, respectively. In comparison with these previous searches, our new search shows enhanced sensitivity in complementary regions of the LLP parameter space. We also comment on many improvements can be implemented to further improve our proposed search.more » « less
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Abstract In this paper, we describe the potential of the LHCb experiment to detect stealth physics. This refers to dynamics beyond the standard model that would elude searches that focus on energetic objects or precision measurements of known processes. Stealth signatures include long-lived particles and light resonances that are produced very rarely or together with overwhelming backgrounds. We will discuss why LHCb is equipped to discover this kind of physics at the Large Hadron Collider and provide examples of well-motivated theoretical models that can be probed with great detail at the experiment.more » « less
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Abstract In this paper, we describe the potential of the LHCb experiment to detect stealth physics. This refers to dynamics beyond the standard model that would elude searches that focus on energetic objects or precision measurements of known processes. Stealth signatures include long-lived particles and light resonances that are produced very rarely or together with overwhelming backgrounds. We will discuss why LHCb is equipped to discover this kind of physics at the Large Hadron Collider and provide examples of well-motivated theoretical models that can be probed with great detail at the experiment.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3389/fdata.2022.1008737
