Abstract
The discovery of the Higgs boson has fully confirmed the Standard Model of particles and fields. Nevertheless, there are still fundamental phenomena, like the existence of dark matter, the neutrino masses and the baryon asymmetry of the Universe, which deserve an explanation that could come from the discovery of new particles. The SHiP experiment at CERN is proposed to search for very weakly coupled particles in the few GeV mass domain where the existence of such particles 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 very intense source of neutrinos and, in particular, of tau neutrinos, the less known particle in the Standard Model. We report the physics potential of such an experiment. An ancillary measurement of the charm cross-section was carried out in July 2018 and the data are under analysis and we report preliminary results. Moreover, a prototype of the neutrino detector is being designed to possibly take data at the LHC in its Run3 of operation. We describe the proposed detector and the physics case.
Highlights
The discovery of the Higgs boson is certainly a big triumph of the Standard Model
Given its mass, it could well be that the Standard Model is an effective theory working all the way up to the Planck scale
Complementary searches for very weakly coupled and long-lived particles require a beam dump facility. Such a facility consists of a high density proton target, followed by a hadron stopper and a muon shield
Summary
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. Complementary searches for very weakly coupled and long-lived particles require a beam dump facility Such a facility consists of a high density proton target, followed by a hadron stopper and a muon shield. The emulsion target is complemented by high resolution tracking chambers inside the magnetic field to provide the time stamp to the event, connect muon tracks from the target to the muon system and measure the charge and momentum for particles (mostly muons) with momenta above 10 GeV/c. A timing detector with a resolution better than 100ps complements the apparatus to reject vertices produced by the chance coincidence of two tracks
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