Physics Opportunities of a Fixed-Target Experiment using the LHC Beams
By S. Brodsky, Franccois Fleuret, C. Hadjidakis, J. Lansberg. 2012
169 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We outline the many physics opportunities o ered by a multi-purpose fixed-target experiment using the proton and lead-ion beams of the LHC extracted by a bent crystal. In a proton run with the LHC 7-TeV beam, one can analyze pp, pd and pA collisions at center-of-mass energy p sNN ’ 115 GeV and even higher using the Fermi motion of the nucleons in a nuclear target. In a lead run with a 2:76 TeVper-nucleon beam, p sNN is as high as 72 GeV. Bent crystals can be used to extract about 5 10 8 protons/sec; the integrated luminosity over a year reaches 0.5 fb 1 on a typical 1 cm-long target without nuclear species limitation. We emphasize that such an extraction mode does not alter the performance of the collider experiments at the LHC. By instrumenting the target-rapidity region, gluon and heavy-quark distributions of the proton and the neutron can be accessed at large x and even at x larger than unity in the nuclear case. Single di ractive physics and, for the first time, the large negative-xF domain can be accessed. The nuclear target-species versatility provides a unique opportunity to study nuclear matter versus the features of the hot and dense matter formed in heavy-ion collisions, including the formation of the quark-gluon plasma, which can be studied in PbA collisions over the full range of target-rapidity domain with a large variety of nuclei. The polarization of hydrogen and nuclear targets allows an ambitious spin program, including measurements of the QCD lensing e ects which underlie the Sivers single-spin asymmetry, the study of transversity distributions and possibly of polarized parton distributions. We also emphasize the potential o ered by pA ultra-peripheral collisions where the nucleus target A is used as a coherent photon source, mimicking photoproduction processes in ep collisions. Finally, we note that W and Z bosons can be produced and detected in a fixed-target experiment and in their threshold domain for the first time, providing new ways to probe the partonic content of the proton and the nucleus.
Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dc943922869951e1781e695f74798f2e060ae9c0
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Citations in the corpus
- Heavy-flavour and quarkonium production in the LHC era: from proton–proton to heavy-ion collisions (2015, background): “Quarkonium production, open heavy-flavour hadrons and prompt photons in p–A collisions can thus be investigated [867, 868] with statistics previously unheard of (see Table 7.”
- Physics case for an LHCb Upgrade II - Opportunities in flavour physics, and beyond, in the HL-LHC era (2018, background): “Samples of this size would allow copious production of Drell-Yan and heavy flavour states, including bb mesons, opening many novel possibilities, which have been studied in the last years, notably by the AFTER initiative [642,643].”
- New observables in inclusive production of quarkonia (2019, background): “It would be interesting to meaasure such a nonprompt fraction in the LHC fixed-target mode in pH collisions at √ s = 115 GeV [140, 147].”