A pioneering experiment at CERN has taken the first step towards a completely new way of studying some of nature’s most elusive particles. Using bent silicon crystals, researchers have successfully demonstrated the ability to deflect high energy particles through long curved crystals. The pilot experiment, called TWOCRYST, was installed in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) after only two years of preparation. It is the first to observe “double channelling”, where particles are sequentially steered through two bent crystals, at the LHC.
The TWOCRYST success also lays the groundwork for future projects, including the proposed ALADDIN experiment, which aims to measure the electric and magnetic dipole moments of charm baryons and provides unique insights into possible physics beyond the Standard Model. The novel ALADDIN experiment features two bent crystals, one crystal directs protons from the LHC halo onto a tungsten target, producing charm baryons; a second crystal then bends these particles for analysis with high-resolution detectors. The Electric Dipole Moment (EDM) and Magnetic Dipole Moment (MDM) of the charmed particles are then studied with the precession of their spin inside the crystal. EDM and MDM are sensitive to physics beyond the Standard Model.
Italian institutions are playing a key role in advancing these technologies and in shaping the physics case that could bring a new generation of experiments to the LHC. The UniMi and INFN-Milano team, led by Nicola Neri (professor at UniMI and spokesperson of the newly established ALADDIN collaboration) and Paolo Gandini (researcher at INFN), contributed to the design, development, and construction of the pixel detector and the experimental setup used in the experiment. This project has been financially supported by INFN, the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), Mission 4, Component 2, Investment 1.1, Call for tender No. 1409 published on 14.9.2022 by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR), funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU - Project Title 43 202277EWLW and the ERC Consolidator Grants SELDOM G.A. 771642.
Useful links
[1] https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/towards-new-physics-bent-crystals
[2] https://twocryst.web.cern.ch/
[3] https://aladdin.web.cern.ch/
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