Turning noise into data: a discovery strategy for new weakly-interacting physics: DISCOVERHEP

Programme(s): H2020-EU.1.1. - EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Topic(s): ERC-2020-STG - ERC STARTING GRANTS

Call for proposal: ERC-2020-STG

Funding Scheme: ERC-STG - Starting Grant

Grant agreement ID: 948254

Objective

"The ATLAS and CMS Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have done an excellent job in searching for new high-energy physics, pushing out to energy scales which have never before been studied. In contrast, low-energy physics has only been studied in specific contexts at the LHC, and remains largely uncovered in the search for new physics. Despite the main focus being on the high-energy regime, it is entirely possible that new physics is instead hiding in the low-energy regime, and it was not observed in previous collider physics experiments due to being rarely produced.

In the context of the DISCOVERHEP project, I will lead a group in the search for new physics in the largely-uncovered low-energy regime. The project will exploit the very-high LHC beam intensity to turn ""noise"", in the form of traditionally unwanted and ignored additional simultaneous proton-proton collisions, into a currently-untapped wealth of useful low-energy physics data. This novel approach thereby opens up the possibility of conducting high-sensitivity searches for low-energy physics at the LHC.

This massive low-energy physics dataset will be used to enable the project goals, in the form of searches for new low-energy weakly-interacting physics conducted using the ATLAS Detector. Three different search strategies, sensitive to different types of new physics, are considered: two types of direct searches for new light particles such as potential mediators between the Standard Model and Dark Matter, and one generic search for new low-energy physics using anomaly detection techniques. These searches will dramatically extend the sensitivity of ATLAS to new low-energy physics, thus expanding the ATLAS physics program and potentially leading the way towards new discoveries."