European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) approved the Forward Search Experiment (FASER), giving a green light to the assembly, installation and use of an instrument that will look for new fundamental particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva.
FASER will complement CERN’s ongoing physics programme, extending its discovery potential to detect some long-sought-after particles that are associated with dark matter.
The five-year FASER project is funded by grants of $1 million each from the Heising-Simons Foundation and the Simons Foundation, with additional support from CERN.
FASER’s focus is to find light, extremely light and weakly interacting particles that have so far eluded scientists, even in the high-energy experiments conducted at the CERN-operated LHC, the largest particle accelerator in the world.
The four main LHC detectors are not suited for such particles that might be produced parallel to the beam line. They may travel hundreds of metres without interacting with any material before transforming into known and detectable particles such as electrons and positrons. FASER will be placed at a specific point along the 26.7-km loop of the LHC and will be precisely aligned with the collision axis of the six-storey-sized ATLAS instrument, about 480 m away. As proton beams pass through the interaction point at the ATLAS instrument, new particles created will go through concrete in the LHC tunnel and then into FASER, which will track and measure the progress of their decay. FASER will collect data any time ATLAS, which was used to discover the Higgs boson, operates.
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