SHiP: a new facility to search for long lived neutral particles and investigate the $\nu_\tau$ properties

TL;DR

SHiP is a proposed fixed target facility at CERN designed to search for long-lived exotic particles and to study tau neutrino properties with unprecedented precision, potentially revealing new physics beyond the Standard Model.

Contribution

The paper introduces the SHiP facility, detailing its design, goals, and potential to explore uncharted parameter spaces for light long-lived particles and tau neutrino physics.

Findings

Proposed sensitivity to light long-lived particles including Dark Photons and Heavy Neutrinos.

First-time measurement potential for tau neutrino cross sections and structure functions.

Enhanced charm physics studies with significantly improved accuracy.

Abstract

SHIP is a new general purpose fixed target facility, whose Technical Proposal has been recently reviewed by the CERN SPS Committee and by the CERN Research Board. The two boards recommended that the experiment proceeds further to a Comprehensive Design phase. A 400 GeV proton beam extracted from the SPS will be dumped on a heavy target with the aim of integrating $2\times 10^{20}$ proton-target collisions (\textit{pot}) in 5 years. A dedicated detector, based on a long vacuum tank followed by a spectrometer and particle identification detectors, will allow to probe a variety of New Physics models with light long-lived exotic particles and masses below $\mathcal{O}(10)$~GeV/$c^2$, including Dark Photons, light scalars and pseudo-scalars, and Heavy Neutrinos. The sensitivity to Heavy Neutrinos will allow for the first time to probe, in the mass range between the $K$ and the $D$ meson mass, a coupling range for which Baryogenesis and neutrino oscillations could also be explained. Another dedicated detector will allow the study of neutrino cross-sections and angular distributions. $\nu_\tau$ deep inelastic scattering cross sections will be measured with a statistics 1000 times larger than currently available, with the extraction of the so far never measured $F_4$ and $F_5$ structure functions, and allow to perform charm physics studies with significantly improved accuracy.