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 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 meant to search for very weakly coupled particles in the few GeV mass domain has been recently proposed. The existence of such particles, foreseen in different theoretical models beyond the Standard Model, 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. Indeed, tau anti-neutrinos have not been directly observed so far. We report the physics potential of such an experiment including the tau neutrino magnetic moment.
Highlights
The discovery of the Higgs boson has fully confirmed the Standard Model of particles and fields
Hidden particles in the GeV mass range would be produced mostly by the decay of charmed hadrons produced in proton interactions
The Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) facility is ideal to study the physics of tau neutrinos, the less known particle in the Standard Model
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 is made of a high density proton target, followed by a hadron stopper and a muon shield. The neutrino target is based on the emulsion cloud chamber technology employed by the OPERA experiment [4], with a compact emulsion spectrometer, made of a sequence of very low density material and emulsion films to measure the charge and momentum of hadrons in magnetic field. This feature would allow to discriminate between tau neutrinos and anti-neutrinos in the hadronic decay channels of the tau lepton. Downstream of the spectrometer, an hadronic and electromagnetic calorimeter and a muon filter are used to identify particles
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