Neutrino Detection without Neutrino Detectors: Discovering Collider Neutrinos at FASER with Electronic Signals Only

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to detect collider neutrinos at the LHC using only electronic signals from FASER, enabling early discovery without relying on emulsion data, thus advancing neutrino physics at TeV energies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to identify collider neutrinos solely through electronic detector signals, bypassing traditional emulsion-based detection methods.

Findings

Potential to discover collider neutrinos with minimal data

Electronic signals alone can achieve 5σ discovery

Early detection prospects in LHC Run 3

Abstract

The detection of collider neutrinos will provide new insights about neutrino production, propagation, and interactions at TeV energies, the highest human-made energies ever observed. During Run 3 of the LHC, the FASER experiment is expected to detect roughly $10^4$ collider neutrinos using its emulsion-based neutrino detector FASER$\nu$. In this study, we show that, even without processing the emulsion data, low-level input provided by the electronic detector components of FASER and FASER$\nu$ will be able to establish a $5\sigma$ discovery of collider neutrinos with as little as $5~\text{fb}^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity. These results foreshadow the possible early discovery of collider neutrinos in LHC Run 3.