W Boson Properties

Studying the properties of the W boson naturally plays a key role in precision tests of the Standard Model. In this paper, the key measurements performed at LEP and the Tevatron over the last decade are reviewed. The current world knowledge of the W boson production and decay properties, gauge couplings, and mass are presented, with an emphasis on the most recent results from LEP2. Some estimates of the sensitivity of the upcoming Tevatron RunII are also presented.Comment: Talk given at the 21st Physics in Collision (Seoul, 2001), 24 pages with 13 figures, to appear in the proceeding

Search for anomalous couplings in the decay of polarized Z bosons to tau lepton pairs

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Physics, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (p. [219]-223).by Eric C. Torrence.Ph.D

FASER: ForwArd Search ExpeRiment at the LHC

FASER, the ForwArd Search ExpeRiment, is a proposed experiment dedicated to searching for light, extremely weakly-interacting particles at the LHC. Such particles may be produced in the LHC's high-energy collisions in large numbers in the far-forward region and then travel long distances through concrete and rock without interacting. They may then decay to visible particles in FASER, which is placed 480 m downstream of the ATLAS interaction point. In this work, we describe the FASER program. In its first stage, FASER is an extremely compact and inexpensive detector, sensitive to decays in a cylindrical region of radius R = 10 cm and length L = 1.5 m. FASER is planned to be constructed and installed in Long Shutdown 2 and will collect data during Run 3 of the 14 TeV LHC from 2021-23. If FASER is successful, FASER 2, a much larger successor with roughly R ~ 1 m and L ~ 5 m, could be constructed in Long Shutdown 3 and collect data during the HL-LHC era from 2026-35. FASER and FASER 2 have the potential to discover dark photons, dark Higgs bosons, heavy neutral leptons, axion-like particles, and many other long-lived particles, as well as provide new information about neutrinos, with potentially far-ranging implications for particle physics and cosmology. We describe the current status, anticipated challenges, and discovery prospects of the FASER program.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, submitted as Input to the European Particle Physics Strategy Update 2018-2020 and draws on FASER's Letter of Intent, Technical Proposal, and physics case documents (arXiv:1811.10243, arXiv:1812.09139, and arXiv:1811.12522

Technical Proposal for FASER: ForwArd Search ExpeRiment at the LHC

FASER is a proposed small and inexpensive experiment designed to search for light, weakly-interacting particles during Run 3 of the LHC from 2021-23. Such particles may be produced in large numbers along the beam collision axis, travel for hundreds of meters without interacting, and then decay to standard model particles. To search for such events, FASER will be located 480 m downstream of the ATLAS IP in the unused service tunnel TI12 and be sensitive to particles that decay in a cylindrical volume with radius R=10 cm and length L=1.5 m. FASER will complement the LHC's existing physics program, extending its discovery potential to a host of new, light particles, with potentially far-reaching implications for particle physics and cosmology. This document describes the technical details of the FASER detector components: the magnets, the tracker, the scintillator system, and the calorimeter, as well as the trigger and readout system. The preparatory work that is needed to install and operate the detector, including civil engineering, transport, and integration with various services is also presented. The information presented includes preliminary cost estimates for the detector components and the infrastructure work, as well as a timeline for the design, construction, and installation of the experiment.Comment: 82 pages, 62 figures; submitted to the CERN LHCC on 7 November 201

FASER's Physics Reach for Long-Lived Particles

FASER,the ForwArd Search ExpeRiment,is a proposed experiment dedicated to searching for light, extremely weakly-interacting particles at the LHC. Such particles may be produced in the LHC's high-energy collisions and travel long distances through concrete and rock without interacting. They may then decay to visible particles in FASER, which is placed 480 m downstream of the ATLAS interaction point. In this work we briefly describe the FASER detector layout and the status of potential backgrounds. We then present the sensitivity reach for FASER for a large number of long-lived particle models, updating previous results to a uniform set of detector assumptions, and analyzing new models. In particular, we consider all of the renormalizable portal interactions, leading to dark photons, dark Higgs bosons, and heavy neutral leptons (HNLs); light B-L and $L_i - L_j$ gauge bosons; axion-like particles (ALPs) that are coupled dominantly to photons, fermions, and gluons through non-renormalizable operators; and pseudoscalars with Yukawa-like couplings. We find that FASER and its follow-up, FASER 2, have a full physics program, with discovery sensitivity in all of these models and potentially far-reaching implications for particle physics and cosmology

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

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