A New Particle Tracker for Soft Physics in LHCb

Nuclear physicists have yet to discover, in high-energy hadron colliders, is the existence of a gluon saturated state of the matter. It is theorized that when nuclei are traveling at ultra-relativistic speeds the gluon den- sity increases. For momentum transfer smaller than Q2s(x), where x is the fractional momentum of the gluon along the beam line, the gluon wave functions start to overlap producing a condensate. Unfortunately, experiments at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collision and at Large Hadron Collider are unable to discover nor study this phenomena directly, but have data that leads them to believe that it can exist. Our goal is to build a particle detector, to be installed in the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment in 2025, to study the soft particles coming from the gluon saturated region. This detector will also contribute to other soft physics studies such as particle flow. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, we are building a prototype particle detector, which consists of triangular extruded scintillators coupled to Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs) through optical fibers. I will present the current status of the prototype preparation and tests.