The Scattering and Neutrino Detector at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN

Abstract

SND@LHC (Scattering Neutrino Detector at the Large Hadron Collider) is a compact and stand-alone experiment to perform measurements with neutrinos produced in the LHC in a hitherto unexplored pseudorapidity region of 7.2 < η < 8.6. The experiment is located in the Tl18 (Target line 18) LHC tunnel, 480 m downstream of the ATLAS detector interaction point. The SND@LHC detector is composed of a hybrid system based on an 800 kg target mass of tungsten plates, interleaved with emulsion and electronic trackers, followed downstream by a muon system. This configuration allows us to distinguish all three neutrino flavors, opening a unique opportunity to probe the physics of heavy flavor production in the LHC in a region that is not accessible to the ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and FASER experiments. The detector concept is also well suited to searching for feebly interacting particles via signatures of scattering in the detector target. The first phase of the experiment has been carried out during the ongoing LHC Run 3, and the first data of the LHC Run3 commissioning period are being processed and analyzed.