#Salvador Urrea González: "ProtoDUNE: A potential new experiment at CERN!!!"

by Salvador Urrea González (Instituto de Física Corpuscular(IFIC) Valencia)

Thursday 16 May 2024, 15:00 → 16:00 Europe/Madrid

1001-Primera-1-1-1 - Paterna. Seminario (Universe)

You are all familiar with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. As an input it receives 400 GeV protons from a smaller accelerator, the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS). However, the LHC is not the sole experiment at CERN; a variety of other experiments, such as NA62 and NA64, also utilize the SPS. These are part of the so-called program of extracted beam lines, where 400 GeV protons are extracted from the SPS and directed to collide with targets, producing various beams of particles for different experiments. Many of these experiments are designed to search for feebly interacting particles (FIPs)?elusive particles like axion-like particles (ALPs), heavy neutral leptons (HNLs), among others?that could address some unresolved open problems of the standard model. The ProtoDUNE detectors are two Liquid argon TPCs, prototypes for the future DUNE far detector; so far they have been used to test their technology. Conveniently, they are positioned in line with one of the 400 GeV proton beams extracted from the SPS. This alignment provides the ProtoDUNE detectors with a neutrino beam for neutrino physics and a FIPs beam for BSM searches. This allows the ProtoDUNE detectors to be used not just as prototypes but as standalone experiments in their own right.

In this talk, I will introduce the program of extracted beam lines at CERN, commenting on the goals and perspectives of these experiments. I will also discuss FIPs, their theoretical motivation, and their experimental searches. In the final part of the talk, I will describe our current efforts to assess the feasibility of the ProtoDUNE detectors for conducting both neutrino physics and BSM searches, highlighting the first tests with real data scheduled for this summer.