Catching Ghosts: First Neutrino Observation and New Searches for Dark Matter | Dr Josh McFayden

There are a billion ghost-like particles passing through an area the size of your thumbnail every second. These are known as neutrinos and play a crucial role in our understanding of the universe, from how the sun shines, to exploding supernovae. But there are also many things we don’t know about neutrinos! FASER is a new particle detector adding to the long history of neutrino physics by being the first experiment to observe directly neutrinos produced in a collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). FASER stands for “ForwArd Search ExpeRiment” and one of its other aims is to search exotic long-lived new particles that are candidates to explain the existence of Dark Matter. If they exist, these exotic particles would be produced in LHC collisions detected by FASER. FASER is able to look for a type of these Dark Matter particles that no experiment until now has had sensitivity to.
Dr Josh McFayden presents the first results from FASER, including the first observation of collider neutrinos and our first search for Dark Matter.

[@kashmirha]

Bad bad audio. :/