FASER experiment
Plan of the LHC experiments and the preaccelerators. | |
| LHC experiments | |
|---|---|
| ATLAS | A Toroidal LHC Apparatus |
| CMS | Compact Muon Solenoid |
| LHCb | LHC-beauty |
| ALICE | A Large Ion Collider Experiment |
| TOTEM | Total Cross Section, Elastic Scattering and Diffraction Dissociation |
| LHCf | LHC-forward |
| MoEDAL | Monopole and Exotics Detector At the LHC |
| FASER | ForwArd Search ExpeRiment |
| SND | Scattering and Neutrino Detector |
| LHC preaccelerators | |
| p and Pb | Linear accelerators for protons (Linac 4) and lead (Linac 3) |
| (not marked) | Proton Synchrotron Booster |
| PS | Proton Synchrotron |
| SPS | Super Proton Synchrotron |
FASER (ForwArd Search ExpeRiment) is one of the nine particle physics experiments in 2022 at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. It is designed to both search for new elementary particles, as well as to detect and study the interactions of high-energy collider neutrinos. In March 2023, FASER reported the first observation of collider neutrinos, which was confirmed shortly after also by SND@LHC.
The experiment is installed in the service tunnel TI12, which is 480 m downstream from the interaction point used by the ATLAS experiment. This tunnel was formerly used to inject the beam from the SPS into the LEP accelerator. In this location, the FASER experiment is placed into an intense and highly collimated beam of both neutrinos as well as possible new particles. Additionally, it is shielded from ATLAS by about 100 meters of rock and concrete, providing a low background environment. The FASER experiment was approved in 2019. The detector was built in the following two years and installed in 2021. The experiment started taking data at the beginning of Run 3 of the LHC in summer 2022.