The potential of CMS as a high-energy neutrino scattering experiment

Abstract

With its enormous number of produced neutrinos the LHC is a prime facility to study the behaviour of high-energy neutrinos. In this paper we propose a novel search strategy for identifying neutrino scattering via displaced appearing jets in the high granularity calorimeter (HGCAL) of the CMS endcap in the high luminosity run of the LHC. We demonstrate in a cut-and-count based analysis how the enormous hadronic background can be reduced while keeping most of the neutrino signal. This paper serves as a proof-of-principle study to illustrate the feasibility of the first direct observation of high-energetic neutrinos coming from $W$ decays.