Observation of Collider Muon Neutrinos with the SND@LHC Experiment
R. Albanese, A. Alexandrov, F. Alicante, A. Anokhina, Takashi Asada, C. Battilana, A. Bay, C. Betancourt, R. Biswas, A. Blanco, M. Bogomilov, D. Bonacorsi, W. Bonivento, P. Bordalo, Alexey Boyarsky, S. Buontempo, M. Campanelli, T. Camporesi, V. Canale, A. Castro, D. Centanni, F. Cerutti, M. Chernyavskiy, Ki-Young Choi, Serhii Cholak, F. Cindolo, M. Climescu, A. P. Conaboy, G. M. Dallavalle, Daniele Davino, P. De Bryas Dexmiers D‘archiac, G. De Lellis, M. de Magistris, A. De Roeck, A. De Rújula, M. De Serio, D. De Simone, A. Di Crescenzo, R. Donà, O. Durhan, F. Fabbri, F. Fedotovs, M. Ferrillo, M. Ferro-Luzzi, R. A. Fini, A. Fiorillo, R. Fresa, W. Funk, F. M. Garay Walls, A. Golovatiuk, A. Golutvin, E. Graverini, A. M. Guler, V. Guliaeva, G. Haefeli, Juan Carlos Helo, E. van Herwijnen, P. Iengo, S. Ilieva, Angelo Infantino, A. Iuliano, R. Jacobsson, C. Kamiscioglu, Anni Kauniskangas, E. Khalikov, S. H. Kim, Yeong Gyun Kim, G. Klioutchnikov, M. Komatsu, N. S. Konovalova, S.G. Kovalenko, S. Kuleshov, H. Lacker, O. Lantwin, F. Lasagni Manghi, A. Lauria, Kang Young Lee, Kyong Sei Lee, S. Lo Meo, V. P. Loschiavo, S. Marcellini, A. Margiotta, A. Mascellani, Andrea Miano, Oleksii Mikulenko, M.C. Montesi, F. L. Navarria, S. Ogawa, N. Okateva, Maksym Ovchynnikov, Giulia Paggi, B. D. Park, A. Pastore, A. Perrotta, Д. Подгрудков, N. Polukhina, Andrea Prota, A. Quercia, S. Ramos, A. Reghunath
Abstract
We report the direct observation of muon neutrino interactions with the SND@LHC detector at the Large Hadron Collider. A dataset of proton-proton collisions at sqrt[s]=13.6 TeV collected by SND@LHC in 2022 is used, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 36.8 fb^{-1}. The search is based on information from the active electronic components of the SND@LHC detector, which covers the pseudorapidity region of 7.2<η<8.4, inaccessible to the other experiments at the collider. Muon neutrino candidates are identified through their charged-current interaction topology, with a track propagating through the entire length of the muon detector. After selection cuts, 8 ν_{μ} interaction candidate events remain with an estimated background of 0.086 events, yielding a significance of about 7 standard deviations for the observed ν_{μ} signal.