The SHiP physics program at CERN

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.