FASER: The Lifetime Frontier at the LHC and the Search for Dark Matter

The Forward Search Experiment (FASER) is the newest experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and is at the forefront of the lifetime frontier in the search for dark matter and other new phenomena. It is uniquely situated around 500 m from the LHC interaction point 1 (IP1) and will be able to detect the decays of new, low mass, weakly interacting particles which are thought to act as a mediator between the particles that make up ordinary matter and a new dark sector. These particles have relatively long lifetimes as they interact only very weakly and therefore can travel sizeable distances before decaying into other particles that can be detected. No other experiment currently running at the LHC will be able to detect these particles. The FASER detector was installed during the LHC Long Shutdown 2 (LS2) and will start taking data in 2022.