Searches for new physics at SND@LHC

TL;DR

SND@LHC is designed to detect neutrinos and search for feebly interacting particles, offering new sensitivity to dark matter and portal particles, and comparing its potential with other experiments like FASER.

Contribution

This paper evaluates SND@LHC's sensitivity to feebly interacting particles and compares its potential with other forward experiments at the LHC.

Findings

SND@LHC can probe leptophobic dark matter scattering.

It can detect decays of neutrino, scalar, and vector portal particles.

Potential sensitivity is comparable or complementary to FASER/FASERν.

Abstract

SND@LHC is an approved experiment equipped to detect scattering of neutrinos produced in the far-forward direction at the LHC, and aimed to measure their properties. In addition, the detector has a potential to search for new feebly interacting particles (FIPs) that may be produced in proton-proton collisions. In this paper, we discuss FIPs signatures at SND@LHC considering two classes of particles: stable FIPs that may be detected via their scattering, and unstable FIPs that decay inside the detector. We estimate the sensitivity of SND@LHC to probe scattering of leptophobic dark matter, and to detect decays of neutrino, scalar, and vector portal particles. Finally, we also compare and qualitatively analyze the potential of SND@LHC and FASER/FASER{\nu} experiments for these searches.