FORWARD SEARCH EXPERIMENT (FASER)

About: 

• Objective: FASER's focus is to find light, extremely weakly interacting particles that have so far eluded scientists, even in the high-energy experiments conducted at the CERN-operated Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest particle accelerator in the world. 
  • Seven years ago, scientists discovered the Higgs boson at the LHC, completing one chapter in our search for the fundamental building blocks of the universe. 
    
    
  • But now scientists are looking for new particles. The dark matter problem shows that we don't know what most of the universe is made of. 
    
    
  
  
  
• Bodies involved: Initiated by physicists at the University of California, Irvine, the FASER project is funded by grants from the Heising-Simons Foundation and the Simons Foundation – with additional support from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. 
  
  
• Location: The FASER detector, which will be one of only eight research instruments at the LHC, is being built and installed during the collider's current hiatus. 
  
  
• Project Duration: 5-year. 
  • It will collect data from 2021 to 2023. 
    
    
  • The LHC will be shut down again from 2024 to 2026. During that time, the team hopes to install the larger FASER 2 detector, which will be capable of unveiling an even wider array of mysterious, hidden particles. 
    
    
  
  
  
• Working: 
  • The FASER instrument is compact, measuring about 1 meter in diameter and 5 meters long. 
    
    
  • It will be placed at a specific point along the 16-mile loop of the LHC, about 480 meters away from the instrument used by the ATLAS Collaboration to discover the Higgs boson.  
    
    
  • As proton beams pass through the interaction point at the ATLAS instrument, they may create new particles that will go through concrete in the LHC tunnel and then into the FASER instrument, which will track and measure the progress of their decay. 
    
    
  • FASER will collect data any time ATLAS is operating.