https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s2005-02398-2
Experimental Physics
The Femto-experiment for the LHC: The W-boson beams and their targets*
1
LPNHE, Universités Paris VI et Paris VII, Tour 33 RdC, 4, pl. Jussieu, 75252, Paris, France
2
Institute of Nuclear Physics Polish Academy of Sciences, ul. Radzikowskiego 152, 31-342, Cracow, Poland
3
Marian Smoluchowski Institute of Physics, Jagiellonian University, ul. Reymonta 4, 30-059, Cracow, Poland
* e-mail: krasny@lpnhep.in2p3.fr
The LHC has been designed as a collider of proton and ion beams. However, in its experimental program, which is focused mainly on studies of high energy transfer collisions of Standard Model point-like particles, protons and ions will play a backstage role. For the majority of the LHC experimentalists, their role will be confined to providing standardized, acceleration-process-stable envelopes for tunable-density and tunable-isospin bunches of Standard Model constituents: quarks and gluons. The inter-bunch environment of collisions of these Standard Model particles specific to hadronic colliders and absent in the leptonic ones, has always been considered as a burden - an annoying but unavoidable price to pay for increasing the collision-energy of point-like particles in the storage rings. In this paper we shall argue that such a burden can be converted into an important merit of the high-energy hadronic colliders - a corner-stone for a fermi-length-scale "collision-experiment" employing the bunches of spectator quarks and gluons as tunable "femtoscopic" targets for the beams of short-living electroweak bosons.
© Springer-Verlag, 2005