Dark Sectors

FASER

FASER (ForwArd Search ExpeRiment) is the newest experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. It is located next to the LHC, around 500 metres away from the ATLAS experiment, and is designed to search for new light and weakly coupled elementary particles, such as dark photons, and to study the interactions of high-energy neutrinos. The FASER detector was installed during the LHC Long Shutdown 2 (LS2) and started taking data in 2022.

The University of Manchester plays a key role in the operation and calibration of the tracking detector, the most complex detector system in FASER. The Manchester FASER team is led by Dr Michaela Queitsch-Maitland.

Installation of the FASER experiment
FASER event display showing a muon passing through multiple tracking stations
Photo of a tracker plane with all eight silicon strip modules installed

DarkSide

The DarkSide experiment, located in the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Assergi, Italy, aims to discover dark matter in the form of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). The detector consists of a liquid argon time projection chambers (TPCs). The Darkside-50 experiment has been running since 2013, and an upgraded Darkside-20k experiment with 20 tonnes of liquid argon is being planned.

The University of Manchester plays a key role in the direct dark matter detection and BSM searches in the experiment. The Manchester DarkSide team is led by Prof. Darren Price.