Susanne Kühn - The FASER Experiment

New, light particles may be constantly produced in large numbers in proton-proton collisions at the LHC, but still avoid detection. This is because, once produced, such particles go along the proton beam collision axis, where there is no experiment that can detect them in a low-background environment. The background from the interactions of well-known standard model particles needs to be highly suppressed when looking for the rare events associated with new physics particles. On the other hand, new, light, and long-lived particles can easily travel for hundreds of meters without interacting, and then decay to standard model particles, for example, electron-positron pairs, at a distant position well-separated from such background. To explore this far-forward region of the LHC, FASER, the ForwArd Search ExpeRiment is being constructed and commissioned in an unused LHC service tunnel which is 480 m downstream of the proton-proton interaction point of the ATLAS experiment. The seminar will introduce the physics search areas of FASER and describe the experiment design and construction. Highlights of the currently ongoing commissioning and preparation for data taking will be shown.