Speaker
Description
The SHiP experiment has been proposed as a general-purpose fixed-target facility at the CERN SPS North Area, with the start of data taking scheduled for 2026. Consisting of a two-fold detector, it combines the Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) - such as Heavy Neutral Leptons (HNL) and light dark matter - with studies of tau neutrino physics.
The impact of the high-intensity 400 GeV/c proton beam on the hybrid target may create HNL via the decay of heavy mesons and other weakly interacting particles of masses m <= 10 GeV/c^2. After a hadron absorber and an active muon shield, these particles are expected to decay inside a large vacuum vessel which is followed by a magnetic spectrometer and a calorimeter. To discriminate against external particle interactions, the decay vessel will be covered by the Surrounding Background Tagger (SBT).
This talk will give a general overview of the SHiP experiment, then focus on the current design of and ongoing R&D on the segmented liquid scintillator option for the SBT detector.
