Speaker
Description
The SHiP Collaboration has proposed a general-purpose experimental facility operating in beam dump mode at the CERN SPS accelerator with the aim of searching for light, long-lived exotic particles of Hidden Sector models. The SHiP experiment incorporates a muon shield based on magnetic sweeping and two complementary apparatuses. The detector immediately downstream of the muon shield is optimised both for recoil signatures of light dark matter scattering and for tau neutrino physics, and consists of a spectrometer magnet housing a layered detector system with heavy target plates, emulsion film technology and electronic high precision tracking. Using the high-intensity beam of 400 GeV protons, the experiment is capable of integrating $2\times 10^{20}$ protons in five years. The sensitivity to light dark matter reaches well below the elastic scalar Dark Matter relic density limits in the range from a few MeV/c$^2$ up to 200 MeV/c$^2$. The tau neutrino deep-inelastic scattering cross-sections will be measured with a statistics a thousand times larger than currently available, with the extraction of the $F_4$ and $F_5$ structure functions, never measured so far, and allow for new tests of lepton non-universality with sensitivity to BSM physics.
Following the review of the Technical Proposal, the CERN SPS Committee recommended in 2016 that the experiment and the beam dump facility studies proceed to a Comprehensive Design Study phase. These studies have resulted in a mature proposal submitted to the European Strategy for Particle Physics Update.
