Discovery potential of FASER$\nu$ with contained vertex and through-going events

Abstract

FASER$\nu$ is a newly proposed detector whose main mission is to detect the neutrino flux from the collision of the proton beams at the ATLAS Interaction Point (IP) during the run III of the LHC in 2022-2024. We show that this detector can also test certain beyond standard model scenarios, especially the ones in which the neutrino interaction with matter fields can produce new unstable particles decaying back into charged leptons. Models of this kind are motivated by the MiniBooNE anomaly. We show that, if the new physics involves multi-muon production by neutrinos scattering off matter fields, including the neutrino flux interactions in the rock before the detector in the analysis ({\it i.e.,} accounting for the through-going muon pairs) can significantly increase the effective detector mass and its sensitivity to new physics. We propose a concrete model that can give rise to such a multi-muon signal.