CERN physicist Jamie Boyd enters a tunnel close to the ATLAS detector, an experiment at the largest particle accelerator in the world. From there, he

Catching neutrinos at the LHC

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2022-09-21 13:00:11

CERN physicist Jamie Boyd enters a tunnel close to the ATLAS detector, an experiment at the largest particle accelerator in the world. From there, he turns into an underground space labeled TI12. 

“This is a very special tunnel,” Boyd says, “because this is where the old transfer line used to exist for the Large Electron-Positron Collider, before the Large Hadron Collider.” After the LHC was built, a new transfer line was added, “and this tunnel was then abandoned.” 

The tunnel is abandoned no more. Its new resident is an experiment much humbler in size than the neighboring ATLAS detector. Five meters in length, the ForwArd Search ExpeRiment, or FASER, detector sits in a shallow excavated trench in the floor, surrounded by low railings and cables. 

Scientists—including Boyd, who serves as co-spokesperson for FASER—installed the relatively small detector in 2021. Just in time before restarting the LHC in April, physicists nestled another small experiment, called Scattering and Neutrino Detector or SND@LHC, on the other side of ATLAS. 

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