The LHCf (Large Hadron Collider forward) is a special-purpose

Large Hadron Collider The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundred ...

experiment for astroparticle (

cosmic ray Cosmic rays are high-energy particles or clusters of particles (primarily represented by protons or atomic nuclei) that move through space at nearly the speed of light. They originate from the Sun, from outside of the Solar System in our own ...

) physics, and one of eight detectors in the LHC accelerator at

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gene ...

. The other seven are:

ATLAS An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a bundle of maps of Earth or of a region of Earth. Atlases have traditionally been bound into book form, but today many atlases are in multimedia formats. In addition to presenting geographic ...

ALICE Alice may refer to: * Alice (name), most often a feminine given name, but also used as a surname Literature * Alice (''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland''), a character in books by Lewis Carroll * ''Alice'' series, children's and teen books by ...

CMS CMS may refer to: Computing * Call management system * CMS-2 (programming language), used by the United States Navy * Code Morphing Software, a technology used by Transmeta * Collection management system for a museum collection * Color managem ...

MoEDAL MoEDAL (Monopole and Exotics Detector at the LHC) is a particle physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Experiment MoEDAL shares the cavern at Point 8 with LHCb, and its prime goal is to directly search for the magnetic monopole (M ...

TOTEM A totem (from oj, ᑑᑌᒼ, italics=no or ''doodem'') is a spirit being, sacred object, or symbol that serves as an emblem of a group of people, such as a family, clan, lineage, or tribe, such as in the Anishinaabe clan system. While ''the wo ...

, LHCb and FASER. LHCf is designed to study the particles generated in the "

forward Forward is a relative direction, the opposite of backward. Forward may also refer to: People * Forward (surname) Sports * Forward (association football) * Forward (basketball), including: ** Point forward ** Power forward (basketball) ** Sm ...

" region of collisions, those almost directly in line with the colliding proton beams. It therefore consists of two detectors, 140 m on either side of the interaction point. Because of this large distance, it can co-exist with a more conventional detector surrounding the interaction point, and shares the interaction point IP1 with the much larger general-purpose ATLAS experiment.

Purpose

The LHCf is intended to measure the energy and numbers of neutral

pions In particle physics, a pion (or a pi meson, denoted with the Greek letter pi: ) is any of three subatomic particles: , , and . Each pion consists of a quark and an antiquark and is therefore a meson. Pions are the lightest mesons and, more gene ...

() produced by the collider. This will hopefully help explain the origin of

ultra-high-energy cosmic ray In astroparticle physics, an ultra-high-energy cosmic ray (UHECR) is a cosmic ray with an energy greater than 1 EeV (1018 electronvolts, approximately 0.16 joules), far beyond both the rest mass and energies typical of other cosmic ray partic ...

s. The results will complement other high-energy cosmic ray measurements from the

Pierre Auger Observatory The Pierre Auger Observatory is an international cosmic ray observatory in Argentina designed to detect ultra-high-energy cosmic rays: sub-atomic particles traveling nearly at the speed of light and each with energies beyond 1018 eV. In Ear ...

in Argentina, and the

Telescope Array Project The Telescope Array project is an international collaboration involving research and educational institutions in Japan, The United States, Russia, South Korea, and Belgium. The experiment is designed to observe air showers induced by ultra-high- ...

in Utah.

References

LHCf section on US/LHC WebsiteLHCf: a tiny new experiment joins the LHC
CERN Courier, Nov 1, 2006, retrieved on 2009-03-25. (Describes the location of the experiment.)
The LHCf experiment at LHCTechnical Design Report of LHCf
* (Full design documentation) * (Full design documentation)

External links

*
LHCf experiment
record on

INSPIRE-HEP INSPIRE-HEP is an open access digital library for the field of high energy physics (HEP). It is the successor of the Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System (SPIRES) database, the main literature database for high energy physics since the 1970 ...

CERN experiments Particle experiments Large Hadron Collider {{particle-stub