Neutrino detection at the Large Hadron Collider: SND@LHC

• Main Author: Biswas, Riddhi
• Other Authors: Chew Lock Yue
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Science::Physics::Nuclear and particle physics
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/166365
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Neutrinos are notoriously well-known as the most mysterious and elusive particles in the Standard Model of Particle Physics. They have attracted physicists from all over the world who want to study the properties of these unique neutral, weakly interacting, and particularly most abundant fermions present in the Universe. This is because neutrinos have the potential to allow precise tests on the Standard Model and act as a probe towards new physics such as what is needed for CP violation, and lepton number violation. The necessity to understand the properties of these particles has given rise to several experiments and even caught the attention of scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. It was soon realised that neutrinos, of the unexplored energy range of 350 GeV- 1 TeV, are produced in large numbers in the “forward” direction at the LHC by the weak decay of hadrons produced in the proton-proton collisions pp → νX. These LHC neutrinos can also shed light on heavy-flavour production in proton-proton collisions, and provide a huge sample of so far poorly studied tau neutrinos. Current LHC detectors cannot observe these neutrinos, and this led to the forward-physics programme at the LHC with two new experiments FASERν and SND@LHC. SND@LHC aims to measure high-energy neutrino cross-sections at the LHC and use these to study electroweak and QCD phenomena. This project reports on a first study using detailed simulation. The focus of the project is the study of the energy reconstruction of neutrino energy in the full detector for electron neutrinos νe and the identification of the electromagnetic energy clusters in the tracking detector. This study is an essential prerequisite physics study that will eventually be made with the recorded data. In this project, the first Monte Carlo simulation studies were conducted on the simulation-generated correlation of electron neutrino νe Charged Current (CC) and Neutral Current(NC) events in the detector. A good energy reconstruction for Neutral current events is found with a simple method. However, the reconstruction of electron neutrino-charged current events required a more sophisticated approach by accounting for the granularity of the tracking detector and using likelihood methods. Overall, we discover that such techniques deliver a path for accurate energy reconstruction and these studies will be important in future for performing neutrino event selections in this experiment.