In Pursuit of Particles

In Pursuit of Particles

Almost 300 feet underground, in a side tunnel adjacent to the 17-mile loop of the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) facility, near Geneva, technicians have recently completed the assembly of FASER, a new particle detector that may one day provide hints to the origin and nature of dark matter. FASER is the brainchild of Jonathan Feng, UCI professor of physics & astronomy, with Dave Casper, UCI associate professor of physics & astronomy, responsible for the design and ultimate management of the experiment. Compared to some of the other instruments at the LHC, FASER was built in a hurry – less than two years after winning CERN approval – on a tight budget and partially during a global pandemic. In addition to hunting for dark matter signals, FASER will extend UCI’s primacy in the study of another type of particle, the neutrino, when the LHC resumes operations within the next several months. “No neutrino has ever been detected at the LHC,” Feng says. “But FASER is expected to detect about 10,000 in the coming three years, opening up a whole new area of research.” He adds: “It’s a nice tie-in to the tradition here at UCI because of the legacy of Frederick Reines, a UCI founding faculty member who won the Nobel Prize in physics for being the first to find neutrinos.”