Observation of Collider Muon Neutrinos with the SND@LHC Experiment

We report the direct observation of muon neutrino interactions with the SND@LHC detector at the Large Hadron Collider. A dataset of proton-proton collisions at root s = 13.6 TeV collected by SND@LHC in 2022 is used, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 36.8 fb(-1). The search is based on information from the active electronic components of the SND@LHC detector, which covers the pseudorapidity region of 7.2 < eta < 8.4, inaccessible to the other experiments at the collider. Muon neutrino candidates are identified through their charged-current interaction topology, with a track propagating through the entire length of the muon detector. After selection cuts, 8 nu(mu) interaction candidate events remain with an estimated background of 0.086 events, yielding a significance of about 7 standard deviations for the observed nu(mu) signal.