The SHiP experiment and the RPC technology

TL;DR

The paper discusses the SHiP experiment at CERN, focusing on its potential to discover new particles and the application of RPC technology for detection, including recent design and construction developments.

Contribution

It introduces the use of RPC technology in the SHiP experiment and details the design and construction of new RPC chambers for particle detection.

Findings

RPC technology effectively used as a muon detector in SHiP

Design and construction of new RPC chambers completed

Potential to discover new weakly coupled particles and measure charm cross-section

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 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 and describe the use of the RPC technology therein. An anchillary measurement of the charm cross-section will be carried out in July 2018 and RPC are used as a muon detector. We also describe the design and construction of these new chambers.