The SHiP experiment at the proposed CERN SPS Beam Dump Facility

Abstract

The Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) Collaboration has proposed a general-purpose experimental facility operating in beam-dump mode at the CERN SPS accelerator to search for light, feebly interacting particles. In the baseline configuration, the SHiP experiment incorporates two complementary detectors. The upstream detector is designed for recoil signatures of light dark matter (LDM) scattering and for neutrino physics, in particular with tau neutrinos. It consists of a spectrometer magnet housing a layered detector system with high-density LDM/neutrino target plates, emulsion-film technology and electronic high-precision tracking. The total detector target mass amounts to about eight tonnes. The downstream detector system aims at measuring visible decays of feebly interacting particles to both fully reconstructed final states and to partially reconstructed final states with neutrinos, in a nearly background-free environment. The detector consists of a 50$$\mathrm { \,m}$$ m long decay volume under vacuum followed by a spectrometer and particle identification system with a rectangular acceptance of 5 m in width and 10 m in height. Using the high-intensity beam of 400$$\,\mathrm {GeV}$$ GeV protons, the experiment aims at profiting from the $$4\times 10^{19}$$ 4 × 10 19 protons per year that are currently unexploited at the SPS, over a period of 5–10 years. This allows probing dark photons, dark scalars and pseudo-scalars, and heavy neutral leptons with GeV-scale masses in the direct searches at sensitivities that largely exceed those of existing and projected experiments. The sensitivity to light dark matter through scattering reaches well below the dark matter relic density limits in the range from a few $${\mathrm {\,MeV\!/}c^2}$$ MeV / c 2 up to 100 MeV-scale masses, and it will be possible to study tau neutrino interactions with unprecedented statistics. This paper describes the SHiP experiment baseline setup and the detector systems, together with performance results from prototypes in test beams, as it was prepared for the 2020 Update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics. The expected detector performance from simulation is summarised at the end.

Exploring the potential of FCC-hh to search for particles from B mesons

“…One of the strongest potential to probe HNLs with the mixing angles close to the seesaw bound has SHiP. With its reach in the signal [32] and absence of background (see [32] and references therein), SHiP is a perfect experiment for the next 10-15 years.…”

Extra dimensions with light and heavy neutral leptons: an application to CEνNS

“…MATSULA [65], ShiP [66,67], Bell II [68], FCC [69]. Some earlier works have studied extra dimensions in high energy colliders [70][71][72][73].…”

“…MATSULA [65], ShiP [66,67], Bell II [68], FCC [69]. The constraints derived from the heavy right-handed neutrino masses produced through the dipole interactions in refs.…”

“…However, future experiments with accelerator and reactor neutrinos can also test the extra dimensions using the different frameworks presented here [91,108,121,[134][135][136][137][138][139][140][141][142][143][144]. Moreover, since the size of the 4D mass of the heavy right-handed neutrinos is restricted only by the energy of the incoming neutrinos, an interesting application of this framework would be to the high energy facilities, for example, LHC [63], FASER [64], MATSULA [65], ShiP [66,67], Bell II [68], FCC [69]. The sensitivity studies of the heavy neutral lepton in refs.…”

Swampland bounds on dark sectors

“…We now compare the region covered by the FL arguments with other probes of millicharged particles. Accelerators are sensitive to new particles up to the ∼ TeV scale [52][53][54]. However, for the extremely weak charges that we are interested in there are more precise laboratory probes.…”