The Femto-experiment for the LHC: The W-boson beams and their targets
Résumé
The LHC has been designed as a collider of proton and ion beams. However, in its experimental program, which is focused mainly on studies of high energy transfer collisions of Standard Model point-like particles, protons and ions will play a backstage role. For the majority of the LHC experimentalists, their role will be confined to providing standardized, acceleration-process-stable envelopes for tunable-density and tunable-isospin bunches of Standard Model constituents: quarks and gluons. The inter-bunch environment of collisions of these Standard Model particles specific to hadronic colliders and absent in the leptonic ones, has always been considered as a burden - an annoying but unavoidable price to pay for increasing the collision-energy of point-like particles in the storage rings. In this paper we shall argue that such a burden can be converted into an important merit of the high-energy hadronic colliders - a corner-stone for a fermi-length-scale "collision-experiment" employing the bunches of spectator quarks and gluons as tunable "femtoscopic" targets for the beams of short-living electroweak bosons.