3:30–4:30 pm Maria Geoppert-Mayer Lecture Hall
FASER and the Forward Physics Facility: New Eyes for the LHC
Jonathan Lee Feng, University of California, Irvine
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has been the focus of attention in high-energy physics for decades. Despite this, in recent years, it has become clear that the physics potential of the LHC is far from being fully explored. In particular, the existing large detectors are blind to forward collisions, which produce particles along the beamline at enormous rates. We now know that these collisions are a treasure trove of physics, containing the highest-energy neutrinos ever produced by humans and possible evidence for dark matter, dark sectors, milli-charged particles, and other new particles and forces. FASER is a small and inexpensive experiment that was built in 18 months and began taking data in 2022. FASER recently directly detected the first neutrinos in the 53-year history of particle colliders, opening a new window on the high-energy frontier, and it is searching for new particles with world-leading sensitivity. This talk will describe how FASER came to be, how it complements the traditional LHC program, and how it serves as a pathfinder experiment for the Forward Physics Facility, a proposal to fully realize the potential of forward physics at the High Luminosity LHC in the coming decade.