Speaker
Description
A polarized gaseous target, operated in combination with the high-energy, high-intensity LHC beams and a highly performing LHC particle detector, has the potential to open new physics frontiers and to deepen our understanding of the intricacies of the strong interaction in the non-perturbative regime of QCD. Specifically, the LHCspin project aims to perform spin physics studies in high-energy polarized fixed-target collisions using the LHCb detector. Given its forward geometry (2<𝜂<5), the LHCb spectrometer is, in fact, perfectly suitable to cover the forward kinematics of these collisions. This ambitious task poses its basis on the recent installation and successfull operation of SMOG2, a storage-cell based unpolarized gas target in front of the LHCb spectrometer. With the installation of the proposed polarized target system, LHCb will become the first experiment delivering simultaneously unpolarized beam-beam collisions at 14 TeV and bot polarized and unpolarized beam-target collisions at center-of-mass energies of the order of 100 GeV. The status of the LHCspin project is presented.
