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  • Open Access

Investigation of low-energy particle remnants in high-energy collisions at the LHC with a skipper-CCD detector

Brenda A. Cervantes-Vergara1,*, Santiago E. Perez1,2,3,†, Nicola Bacchetta1,4, Nuria Castelló-Mor5, Juan Estrada1, Marcos Fernandez Garcia5, Petra Merkel1, María Pérez Martínez5, Dario Rodrigues2,3 et al.

Javier Tiffenberg1,3 and Rocío Vilar Cortabitarte5

  • *Contact author: bcervant@fnal.gov
  • †Contact author: santiep.137@gmail.com

Phys. Rev. D 113, 032006 – Published 10 February, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/mm7w-6s2t

Abstract

We deployed the Mobile Skipper Testing Apparatus ∼33  m away from the Compact Muon Solenoid collision point, the first skipper-CCD detector probing low-energy particles produced in high-energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. In this work, we search for beam-related events using data collected in 2024 during beam-on and beam-off periods. The dataset corresponds to integrated luminosities of 113.3  fb−1 and 1.54  nb−1 for the proton-proton and Pb-Pb collision periods, respectively. We report observed event rates in a model-independent framework across two ionization regions: ≤20e− and >20e−. For the low-energy region, we perform a likelihood analysis to test the null hypothesis of no beam-correlated signal. We found no significant correlation during proton-proton and Pb-Pb collisions. For the high-energy region, we present the energy spectra for both collision periods and compare event rates for images with and without luminosity. We observe a slight increase in the event rate following the Pb-Pb collisions, coinciding with a rise in the single-electron rate, which will be investigated in future work. Using the low-energy proton-proton results, we place 95% confidence level constraints on the mass-millicharge parameter space of millicharged particles. Overall, the results in this work demonstrate the viability of skipper-CCD technology to explore new physics at high-energy colliders and motivate future searches with more massive detectors.

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