The SHiP experiment at CERN

Giovanni De Lellis

doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1137/1/012059

Abstract

The discovery of the Higgs boson has fully confirmed the Standard Model of particles and fields. Nevertheless, fundamental phenomena like the existence of dark matter and the baryon asymmetry of the Universe still deserve an explanation that could come from the discovery of new particles. The SHiP experiment proposal at CERN is meant to search for particles in the few GeV mass domain, very weakly coupled with ordinary particles. The existence of such particles, foreseen in Beyond Standard Models, is largely unexplored. A beam dump facility using high intensity 400 GeV protons is a copious source of such unknown particles in the GeV mass range. The beam dump is also a copious source of neutrinos and in particular it is an ideal source of tau neutrinos, the less known particle in the Standard Model. We report the physics potential of such an experiment. We also describe an ancillary measurement of the charm cross-section carried out in July 2018.

Highlights

The discovery of the Higgs boson is certainly a big triumph of the Standard Model
Fundamental phenomena like the existence of dark matter and the baryon asymmetry of the Universe still deserve an explanation that could come from the discovery of new particles
The Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) experiment proposal at CERN is meant to search for particles in the few GeV mass domain, very weakly coupled with ordinary particles

Summary

Introduction

The discovery of the Higgs boson is certainly a big triumph of the Standard Model. In particular, given its mass, it could well be that the Standard Model is an effective theory working all the way up to the Planck scale. A new experiment, Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP), has been proposed [1] to operate at a beam dump facility to be built at CERN and to search for weakly coupled particles in the few GeV mass range. Hidden particles in the GeV mass range would be produced mostly by the decay of charmed hadrons produced in proton interactions.

Results

Conclusion