Search for new physics with the FASER experiment at the LHC and prospects at future experiments

FASER is a new CERN experiment designed primarily to search for light, weakly-interacting BSM particles with a significant lifetime in the far-forward region of the LHC.

Located 480m downstream of the proton-proton interaction point (IP) used by the ATLAS experiment, the detector is a cylindrical spectrometer, consisting primarily of a tracker and a calorimeter, immersed in a 0.6T magnetic field.

It successfully started data-taking in summer 2022 during LHC run-3 and has collected approximately 60/fb of data so far, leading to the first direct observation of collider neutrinos and first searches for Dark Photons and Axion-like particles in previously unexplored phase space.

Liverpool, the largest UK group on FASER, played a major role in the latter and currently hold the role of Physics Coordinator, overseeing the entire physics programme.

The student is expected to play a leading role in searches for long-lived BSM particles (LLPs) with the full run-3 dataset collected by 2025.

For the HL-LHC, there is a proposal for a dedicated Forward Physics Facility (FPF), hosting a suite of experiments including a 10x larger FASER2 detector with a significantly expanded physics reach.

The student will study and optimise the layout of the tracking detector, which forms the main component of FASER2 and is crucial to exploit the proposed physics programme.

Cutting across the FASER and FASER2 activities, the student would play a major role in developing and improving the tracking software, building on RAL's expertise in this area.