No Arabic abstract
The goal of FASER, ForwArd Search ExpeRiment at the LHC, is to discover light, weakly-interacting particles with a small and inexpensive detector placed in the far-forward region of ATLAS or CMS. A promising location in an unused service tunnel 480 m downstream of the ATLAS interaction point (IP) has been identified. Previous studies have found that FASER has significant discovery potential for new particles produced at the IP, including dark photons, dark Higgs bosons, and heavy neutral leptons. In this study, we explore a qualitatively different, `beam dump capability of FASER, in which the new particles are produced not at the IP, but through collisions in detector elements further downstream. In particular, we consider the discovery prospects for axion-like particles (ALPs) that couple to the standard model through the $a gamma gamma$ interaction. TeV-scale photons produced at the IP collide with the TAN neutral particle absorber 130 m downstream, producing ALPs through the Primakoff process, and the ALPs then decay to two photons in FASER. We show that FASER can discover ALPs with masses $m_a sim 30 - 400~text{MeV}$ and couplings $g_{agammagamma} sim 10^{-6} - 10^{-3}~text{GeV}^{-1}$, and we discuss the ALP signal characteristics and detector requirements.
Photon beams at photon colliders are very narrow, powerful (10--15 MW) and cannot be spread by fast magnets (because photons are neutral). No material can withstand such energy density. For the ILC-based photon collider, we suggest using a 150 m long, pressurized (P ~ 4 atm) argon gas target in front of a water absorber which solves the overheating and mechanical stress problems. The neutron background at the interaction point is estimated and additionally suppressed using a 20 m long hydrogen gas target in front of the argon.
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 LHCs 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.
Axion-like particles (ALPs) are predicted by many extensions of the Standard Model (SM). When ALP mass lies in the range of MeV to GeV, the cosmology and astrophysics will be largely irrelevant. In this work, we investigate such light ALPs through the ALP-strahlung process $pp to V a (to gammagamma)$ at the LHC. With the photon-jet algorithm, we demonstrate that our approach can extend the LHC sensitivity and improve the existing limits on ALP-photon coulping in the ALP mass range from 0.3 GeV to 10 GeV at the 14 TeV LHC with an integrated luminosity of 3000 fb$^{-1}$.
A significant fraction of pp collisions at the LHC will involve (quasi-real) photon interactions occurring at energies well beyond the electroweak energy scale. Hence, the LHC can to some extend be considered as a high-energy photon-photon or photon-proton collider. This offers a unique possibility for novel and complementary research where the available effective luminosity is small, relative to parton-parton interactions, but it is compensated by better known initial conditions and usually simpler final states. This is in a way a method for approaching some of the issues to be addressed by the future lepton collider. Such studies of photon interactions are possible at the LHC, thanks to the striking experimental signatures of events involving photon exchanges, in particular the presence of very forward scattered protons.
High energy positron annihilation is a viable mechanism to produce dark photons ($A^prime$). This reaction plays a significant role in beam-dump experiments using experiments using multi-GeV electron-beams on thick targets by enhancing the sensitivity to $A^prime$ production. The positrons produced by the electromagnetic shower can produce an $A^prime$ via non-resonant ($e^+ + e^- to gamma + A^prime$) and resonant ($e^+ + e^- to A^prime$) annihilation on atomic electrons. For visible decays, the contribution of resonant annihilation results in a larger sensitivity with respect to limits derived by the commonly used $A^prime$-strahlung in certain kinematic regions. When included in the evaluation of the E137 beam-dump experiment reach, positron annihilation pushes the current limit on $varepsilon$ downwards by a factor of two in the range 33 MeV/c$^2<m_{A^prime}<120$ MeV/c$^2$.