The Forward Physics Facility at the High-Luminosity LHC

High energy collisions at the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (LHC) produce a large number of particles along the beam collision axis, outside of the acceptance of existing LHC experiments. The proposed Forward Physics Facility (FPF), to be located several hundred meters from the ATLAS interaction point and shielded by concrete and rock, will host a suite of experiments to probe standard model (SM) processes and search for physics beyond the standard model (BSM). In this report, we review the status of the civil engineering plans and the experiments to explore the diverse physics signals that can be uniquely probed in the forward region. FPF experiments will be sensitive to a broad range of BSM physics through searches for new particle scattering or decay signatures and deviations from SM expectations in high statistics analyses with TeV neutrinos in this low-background environment. High statistics neutrino detection will also provide valuable data for fundamental topics in perturbative and non-perturbative QCD and in weak interactions. Experiments at the FPF will enable synergies between forward particle production at the LHC and astroparticle physics to be exploited. We report here on these physics topics, on infrastructure, detector, and simulation studies, and on future directions to realize the FPF’s physics potential

First Direct Observation of Collider Neutrinos with FASER at the LHC

We report the first direct observation of neutrino interactions at a particle collider experiment. Neutrino candidate events are identified in a 13.6 TeV center-of-mass energy $pp$ collision data set of 35.4 fb${}^{-1}$ using the active electronic components of the FASER detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The candidates are required to have a track propagating through the entire length of the FASER detector and be consistent with a muon neutrino charged-current interaction. We infer $153^{+12}_{-13}$ neutrino interactions with a significance of 16 standard deviations above the background-only hypothesis. These events are consistent with the characteristics expected from neutrino interactions in terms of secondary particle production and spatial distribution, and they imply the observation of both neutrinos and anti-neutrinos with an incident neutrino energy of significantly above 200 GeV.Comment: Submitted to PRL on March 24 202

A Roadmap for HEP Software and Computing R&D for the 2020s

Particle physics has an ambitious and broad experimental programme for the coming decades. This programme requires large investments in detector hardware, either to build new facilities and experiments, or to upgrade existing ones. Similarly, it requires commensurate investment in the R&D of software to acquire, manage, process, and analyse the shear amounts of data to be recorded. In planning for the HL-LHC in particular, it is critical that all of the collaborating stakeholders agree on the software goals and priorities, and that the efforts complement each other. In this spirit, this white paper describes the R&D activities required to prepare for this software upgrade.Peer reviewe

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements

First neutrino interaction candidates at the LHC

FASER$\nu$ at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is designed to directly detect collider neutrinos for the first time and study their cross sections at TeV energies, where no such measurements currently exist. In 2018, a pilot detector employing emulsion films was installed in the far-forward region of ATLAS, 480 m from the interaction point, and collected 12.2 fb$^{-1}$ of proton-proton collision data at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. We describe the analysis of this pilot run data and the observation of the first neutrino interaction candidates at the LHC. This milestone paves the way for high-energy neutrino measurements at current and future colliders.Comment: Auxiliary materials are available at https://faser.web.cern.ch/fasernu-first-neutrino-interaction-candidate

The FASER Detector

FASER, the ForwArd Search ExpeRiment, is an experiment dedicated to searching for light, extremely weakly-interacting particles at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Such particles may be produced in the very forward direction of the LHC's high-energy collisions and then decay to visible particles inside the FASER detector, which is placed 480 m downstream of the ATLAS interaction point, aligned with the beam collisions axis. FASER also includes a sub-detector, FASER$\nu$, designed to detect neutrinos produced in the LHC collisions and to study their properties. In this paper, each component of the FASER detector is described in detail, as well as the installation of the experiment system and its commissioning using cosmic-rays collected in September 2021 and during the LHC pilot beam test carried out in October 2021. FASER will start taking LHC collision data in 2022, and will run throughout LHC Run 3