Commissioning and first collisions with the LHCb SMOG2 system

Abstract

Owing to the injection of gas in the CERN LHC accelerator beampipe through the System for Measuring Overlap with Gas (SMOG), the LHCb experiment has been pioneering since 2015 fixed-target physics at the highest energy ever reached. Within the upgrade of the experiment, a confinement cell for the gas, SMOG2, and a new gas injection system were installed. This dedicated setup opens unique possibilities for extensive measurements for heavyion, hadron, spin and astroparticle physics. In this contribution, the SMOG2 system is presented, focussing on its validation and first outcome as obtained from the exploitation of the proton-gas data collected in 2022.