SHiP: a new multipurpose beam-dump experiment at the SPS

CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

^a e-mail: Hans.Dijkstra@cern.ch

Published online: 4 November 2016

Abstract

SHiP is an experiment to look for very weakly interacting particles at a new to be constructed beam-dump facility at the CERN SPS. The SHiP Technical Proposal has been submitted to the CERN SPS Committee in April 2015. The 400 GeV/c proton beam extracted from the SPS will be dumped on a heavy target with the aim of integrating 2 × 10²⁰ proton on target in five years. A detector located downstream of the target, based on a long vacuum tank followed by a spectrometer and particle identification detectors, will allow probing a variety of models with light long-lived exotic particles and masses below a few GeV/c². The main focus will be the physics of the so-called Hidden Portals, i.e. search for Dark Photons, Light scalars and pseudo-scalars, and Heavy Neutral Leptons (HNL). The sensitivity to HNL will allow for the first time to probe, in the mass range between the kaon and the charm meson mass, a coupling range for which Baryogenesis and active neutrino masses could also be explained. Integrated in SHiP is an Emulsion Cloud Chamber, already used in the OPERA experiment, which will allow to study active neutrino cross-sections and angular distributions. In particular SHiP can distinguish between v_τ and v̄_τ, and their deep inelastic scattering cross sections will be measured with statistics three orders of magnitude larger than currently available.