Large Hadron Collider Detects 'Ghost Particles' For The 1st Time

Physicists have detected “ghost particles” in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for the first time. An experiment called FASER picked up telltale signals of neutrinos being produced in particle collisions, which can help scientists better understand key physics, Michael Irving reported for New Atlas.

Photo Insert: The Large Hadron Collider

Neutrinos are elementary particles that are electrically neutral, extremely light and rarely interact with particles of matter. These characteristics make them tricky to detect, even though they’re very common, thus earning the moniker “ghost particles.”

Neutrinos are produced in stars, supernovae, quasars. radioactive decay and from cosmic rays interacting with atoms in the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s long been thought that particle accelerators like the LHC should be making them too, but without the right instruments they would just zip away undetected.

And now that “right instrument” has been installed and tested. During a pilot run of an experiment called FASER, installed in 2018, scientists from the University of California-Irvine picked up six neutrino interactions.

“Prior to this project, no sign of neutrinos has ever been seen at a particle collider,” says Jonathan Feng, co-author of a study describing the results.“

"This significant breakthrough is a step toward developing a deeper understanding of these elusive particles and the role they play in the universe.” The research was published in the journal Physical Review D.

Located 480 m (1,575 ft) down the line from where the particle collisions occur, the FASER instrument works like film photography, the team says. The detector is made up of plates of lead and tungsten, separated by layers of an emulsion.

Some of the neutrinos will strike the nuclei of atoms in the dense metals, which creates other particles that stream through the emulsion. The tracks they leave behind can then be seen when the emulsion layers are “developed” like film. And sure enough, six of these marks were spotted in the data.

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