Speaker
Description
SND@LHC is a compact experiment proposed to exploit the high flux of energetic neutrinos of all flavours from the LHC in a hitherto unexplored pseudo-rapidity region of 7.2 < 𝜂 < 8.4, complementary to all the other experiments at the LHC. The experiment is located 480 m downstream of IP1 in the unused TI18 tunnel. The detector is composed of a hybrid system based on an 830 kg target mass of tungsten plates, interleaved with emulsion and electronic trackers, also acting as an electromagnetic calorimeter, and followed by a hadronic calorimeter and a muon identification system. The configuration allows efficiently distinguishing between all three neutrino flavours, opening a unique opportunity to probe physics of heavy flavour production at the LHC in the region that is not accessible to ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. This region is of particular interest also for future circular colliders and for predictions of very high-energy atmospheric neutrinos. The physics programme includes studies of charm production, and lepton universality tests in the neutral sector. The detector concept is also well suited to searching for Feebly Interacting Particles via signatures of scattering in the detector target. The first phase aims at operating the detector throughout LHC Run 3 to collect a total of 250 fb−1. The experiment was installed in the TI18 tunnel at CERN and has collected its first data in 2022. A new era of collider neutrino physics has started.
