High-density gas target at the LHCb experiment

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2407.14200
• Publication Date: 2024-11-08
• Authors: O. Boente Garcia; G. Bregliozzi; D. Calegari; V. Carassiti; G. Ciullo; V. Coco; P. Collins; P. Costa Pinto; C. De Angelis; P. Di Nezza; R. Dumps; M. Ferro-Luzzi; F. Fleuret; G. Graziani; S. Kotriakhova; P. Lenisa; Q. Lu; C. Lucarelli; E. Maurice; S. Mariani; K. Mattioli; M. Milovanovic; L. L. Pappalardo; D. M. Parragh; A. Piccoli; P. Sainvitu; B. Salvant; F. Sanders; M. Santimaria; J. Sestak; S. Squerzanti; E. Steffens; G. Tagliente; W. Vollenberg; C. Vollinger
• Keywords: High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex); Physics - Instrumentation and Detectors; Nuclear and particle physics. Atomic energy. Radioactivity; 0103 physical sciences; FOS: Physical sciences; QC770-798; Instrumentation and Detectors (physics.ins-det); 01 natural sciences; High Energy Physics - Experiment

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. Published by the American Physical Society 2024