The University of California, Irvine was founded with a mission to catalyze the community and enhance lives through rigorous academics, cutting-edge research, and dedicated public service.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the border of France and Switzerland accelerates counter-rotating beams of protons to the largest energies ever achieved and collides these beams at a few interaction points along a 27-km-circular-beam path. The LHC and its detectors were designed and constructed to discover the Higgs boson, and to search for theorized particles beyond the standard model predicted by the theory of supersymmetry.

This grant supports the design, construction, installation, and operation of the Forward Search Experiment (FASER), a relatively small, quick, and inexpensive experiment searching for theoretically predicted light, weakly-interacting particles at the LHC.

Initiated by physicists at the University of California, Irvine, the FASER project will operate along the beam trajectory of the LHC. As proton beams pass through the interaction points, they may create new particles that will go through concrete in the LHC tunnel and then into the FASER instrument, which will track and measure the progress of their decay.