Abstract

FASER is a newly installed experiment at the LHC designed to look for new forward long-lived particles, produced in proton collisions at Point 1, and decaying several hundred meters downstream. The detector components were commissioned in a surface lab in 2020 and the full detector was installed in the tunnel in March 2021. The experiment is now set to go live at the start of LHC Run 3 and collect data 24 hours a day for several years. During data taking there will be no control room with dedicated shifters onsite to watch over the run continuously. Thus the TDAQ system, monitoring and automatic alerts have been tirelessly stress-tested since installation while collecting on the order of 100 million noise and cosmic-ray events. During the seminar, I will explain what FASER aims to do as well as what it took to fully commission this small detector at a large collider, the custom software infrastructure we built and the unexpected challenges we faced.