High-density gas target at the LHCb experiment

TL;DR

The paper discusses the implementation and initial results of a high-density internal gas target at LHCb, enabling diverse physics research with concurrent fixed-target and collider operations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel gas target system at LHCb, detailing its components, physics potential, and successful commissioning results demonstrating operational feasibility.

Findings

Fixed-target collisions occur concurrently with collider mode.

High-quality reconstruction of beam interactions achieved.

System demonstrates promising physics research opportunities.

Abstract

The recently installed internal gas target at LHCb presents exceptional opportunities for an extensive physics program for heavy-ion, hadron, spin, and astroparticle physics. A storage cell placed in the LHC primary vacuum, an advanced Gas Feed System, the availability of multi-TeV proton and ion beams and the recent upgrade of the LHCb detector make this project unique worldwide. In this paper, we outline the main components of the system, the physics prospects it offers and the hardware challenges encountered during its implementation. The commissioning phase has yielded promising results, demonstrating that fixed-target collisions can occur concurrently with the collider mode without compromising efficient data acquisition and high-quality reconstruction of beam-gas and beam-beam interactions.