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

Project description

Taking a second look at noise, searching for hidden clues to the "hidden sector"

For decades, high-energy particle physics facilities have led the hunt for "new physics," or novel laws, particles and behaviours beyond those of the Standard Model, which remains our incomplete yet best "model of everything" so far. Most efforts to extend this model predict the existence of a "hidden sector" of particles, many of which may be very light, having very weak interactions with our visible Standard Model matter. The EU-funded DISCOVERHEP project is exploring the low-energy regime in the "noise" of a massive collection of previously recorded data on the trail of new physics. The novel search strategies could power a new era of discoveries beyond the Standard Model.

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."

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ERC-STG - Starting Grant

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) ERC-2020-STG

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Host institution

UNIVERSITE DE GENEVE
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 499 975,00
Address
RUE DU GENERAL DUFOUR 24
1211 Geneve
Switzerland

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Region
Schweiz/Suisse/Svizzera Région lémanique Genève
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 499 975,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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