Abstract
The Scattering and Neutrino Detector (SND@LHC) is a compact and stand-alone experiment to perform measurements with neutrinos produced at the LHC in a hitherto unexplored pseudorapidity region of \(7.2<\eta<8.4\) , complementary to all the other experiments at the LHC. The experiment is located 480 m downstream of IP1 in the unused TI18 tunnel. The detector is composed of a hybrid system based on an \({\sim}800\) kg target mass of tungsten plates, interleaved with emulsion and electronic trackers, followed downstream by a calorimeter and a muon system. The configuration allows to efficiently distinguish between all three neutrino flavors, opening a unique opportunity to probe the physics of heavy flavor production at the LHC in the region that is not accessible to ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb. This region is of particular interest also for future circular colliders and for predictions of very high-energy atmospheric neutrinos. The physics program includes studies of charm production and lepton universality tests in the neutral sector. The detector concept is also well suited to searching for feebly interacting particles via signatures of scattering in the detector target. The first phase aims at operating the detector throughout LHC Run 3 to collect a total of 250 fb \({}^{-1}\) . This paper provides an overview of the experiment and its aims and reports on the results from the data taken in the first year of its operation, namely the measurement of the muon flux at TI18 and the observation of muon neutrino interactions.
