The current status of the proposed SHiP experiment at the CERN Beam Dump Facility is presented. SHiP is a general-purpose fixed-target experiment. The 400 GeV/$c$ proton beam extracted from the SPS will be dumped on a heavy target to integrate $2 \times 10^{20}$ protons on target in five years. The detector, based on a long vacuum tank followed by a spectrometer and particle identification detectors, will allow to probe a variety of models with light long-lived exotic particles and masses below ${\cal O}(10)$ GeV/$c^2$. The main focus will be the physics of the so-called hidden portals, i.e. the search for dark photons, light scalars and pseudo-scalars, and heavy neutrinos. The sensitivity to heavy neutrinos will allow to probe, in the mass range between the kaon and the charm meson mass, a coupling range for which baryogenesis and active neutrino masses could also be explained. A second dedicated detector will study neutrinos and explore light dark matter.
SHiP is a proposed general purpose fixed target facility at the CERN SPS accelerator. The main focus will be the physics of the Hidden Sector, \textit{i.e.} search for heavy neutrinos, dark photons and other long lived very weakly interacting particles. A dedicated detector, based on a long vacuum tank followed by a spectrometer and particle identification detectors, will allow probing a variety of models with exotic particles in the GeV mass range. Another dedicated detector will allow the study of Standard Model neutrino cross-sections and angular distribution, and allow detection of light d…
The Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) experiment proposal at CERN demands a dedicated dipole magnet for its scattering and neutrino detector. This requires a very large volume to be uniformly magnetized at B > 1.2 T, with constraints regarding the inner instrumented volume as well as the external region, where no massive structures are allowed and only an extremely low stray field is admitted. In this paper we report the main technical challenges and the relevant design options providing a comprehensive design for the magnet of the SHiP Scattering and Neutrino Detector.
The Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) Collaboration has proposed a general-purpose experimental facility operating in beam-dump mode at the CERN SPS accelerator to search for light, feebly interacting particles. The SHiP experiment incorporates two complementary detectors. The upstream detector is designed for recoil signatures of light dark matter (LDM) scattering and for neutrino physics, in particular with tau neutrinos. It consists of a spectrometer magnet housing a layered detector system with high-density LDM/neutrino target plates, emulsion-film technology and electronic high-precision…
The Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) Collaboration has shown that the CERN SPS accelerator with its 400 $\mathrm{\small GeV/c}$ proton beam offers a unique opportunity to explore the Hidden Sector. The proposed experiment is an intensity frontier experiment which is capable of searching for hidden particles through both visible decays and through scattering signatures from recoil of electrons or nuclei. The high-intensity experimental facility developed by the SHiP collaboration is based on a number of key features and developments which provide the possibility of probing a large part of the…
The SHiP experiment will search for very weakly interacting particles beyond the Standard Model which are produced in a 400 \GeV/$c$ proton beam dump at the CERN SPS. About $10^{11}$ muons per spill will be produced in the dump. To design the experiment such that the muon-induced background is minimized, a precise knowledge of the muon spectrum is required. To validate the muon flux generated by our Pythia and GEANT4 based Monte Carlo simulation (FairShip), we have measured the muon flux emanating from a SHiP-like target at the SPS. This target, consisting of 13 interaction lengths of slabs of…
The light yield and the time resolution of different types of 3 m long scintillating bars instrumented with wavelength shifting fibres and read out by different models of silicon photomultipliers have been measured at a test beam at the T9 area at the CERN Proton Synchrotron. The results obtained with different configurations are presented. A time resolution better than 800 ps, constant along the bar length within 20%, and a light yield of ~ 140 (70) photoelectrons are obtained for bars 3 m long, 4.5 (5) cm wide and 2 (0.7) cm thick. These results nicely match the requirements for the Muon Det…
SHiP (Search for Hidden Particles) is a proposed experiment to be installed at CERN, with the aim of exploring the high intensity beam frontier to investigate the so-called Hidden sector. Since the SPS proton beam interacting with the SHiP high density target is expected to produce a large neutrino flux, the experiment will also study neutrino physics with unprecedented statistics. A dedicated Scattering and Neutrino Detector (SND) is thus being designed. It consists of a nuclear emulsion target and a tracking fibres detector in magnetic field followed by a Muon Identification System. The Muon…
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 mod…
SHIP is a new general purpose fixed target facility, proposed at the CERN SPS accelerator. In five years, $2\times 10^{20}$ protons of 400 GeV/c momentum will be dumped on a Molybdenum target. A detector downstream of the target will allow a search to made for long-lived particles with masses below O(10) GeV/c$^2$ foreseen in several extensions of the Standard Model. Another dedicated detector will allow the study of active neutrino cross-sections and angular distributions. The neutrino detector consists of an emulsion target, based on the Emulsion Cloud Chamber technology fruitfully employed …
Plastic scintillator detectors have been extensively used in particle physics experiments for decades. A large-scale detector is typically arranged as an array of staggered long bars which provide a fast trigger signal and/or particle identification via time-of-flight measurements. Scintillation light is collected by photosensors coupled to both ends of every bar. In this article, we present our study on a direct replacement of commonly used vacuum photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) by arrays of large-area silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs). An SiPM array which is directly coupled to the scintillator …
SHiP (Search for Hidden Particles) is a beam dump experiment proposed at the CERN SPS aiming at the observation of long lived particles very weakly coupled with ordinary matter mostly produced in the decay of charmed hadrons. The beam dump facility of SHiP is also a copious factory of neutrinos of all three kinds and therefore a dedicated neutrino detector is foreseen in the SHiP apparatus. The neutrino detector exploits the Emulsion Cloud Chamber technique with a modular structure, alternating walls of target units and planes of electronic detectors providing the time stamp to the event. GEM …
In July 2018 an optimization run for the proposed charm cross section measurement for SHiP was performed at the CERN SPS. A heavy, moving target instrumented with nuclear emulsion films followed by a silicon pixel tracker was installed in front of the Goliath magnet at the H4 proton beamline. Behind the magnet, scintillating-fibre, drift-tube and RPC detectors were placed. The purpose of this run was to validate the measurement's feasibility, to develop the required analysis tools and fine-tune the detector layout. In this paper, we present the track reconstruction in the pixel tracker and the…
A new general purpose fixed target facility is proposed at the CERN SPS accelerator which is aimed at exploring the domain of hidden particles and make measurements with tau neutrinos. Hidden particles are predicted by a large number of models beyond the Standard Model. The high intensity of the SPS 400~GeV beam allows probing a wide variety of models containing light long-lived exotic particles with masses below ${\cal O}$(10)~GeV/c$^2$, including very weakly interacting low-energy SUSY states. The experimental programme of the proposed facility is capable of being extended in the future, e.g…
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 copi…
This paper presents a fast approach to simulating muons produced in interactions of the SPS proton beams with the target of the SHiP experiment. The SHiP experiment will be able to search for new long-lived particles produced in a 400~GeV$/c$ SPS proton beam dump and which travel distances between fifty metres and tens of kilometers. The SHiP detector needs to operate under ultra-low background conditions and requires large simulated samples of muon induced background processes. Through the use of Generative Adversarial Networks it is possible to emulate the simulation of the interaction of 40…
The Beam Dump Facility (BDF) is a proposed general-purpose facility at CERN, dedicated to fixed target and beam dump experiments, currently being developed in the context of the Physics Beyond Colliders program. The design of the facility will allow to host different types of experiments, of which SHiP is planned to be the initial one. The core of the facility is a high-density target/dump absorbing the full intensity of the SPS beam and generating a cascade of particles that are detected downstream the target complex. The target and its shielding blocks are positioned inside a vessel, which i…
The Beam Dump Facility (BDF) project is a proposed general-purpose facility at CERN, dedicated to beam dump and fixed target experiments. In its initial phase, the facility is foreseen to be exploited by the Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) experiment. Physics requirements call for a pulsed 400 GeV/c proton beam as well as the highest possible number of protons on target (POT) each year of operation, in order to search for feebly interacting particles. The target/dump assembly lies at the heart of the facility, with the aim of safely absorbing the full high intensity Super Proton Synchrotron…
The DsTau project proposes to study tau-neutrino production in high-energy proton interactions. The outcome of this experiment are prerequisite for measuring the $ν_τ$ charged-current cross section that has never been well measured. Precisely measuring the cross section would enable testing of lepton universality in $ν_τ$ scattering and it also has practical implications for neutrino oscillation experiments and high-energy astrophysical $ν_τ$ observations. $D_s$ mesons, the source of tau neutrinos, following high-energy proton interactions will be studied by a novel approach to detect the doub…
We are investigating the feasibility of performing a measurement of $BR(K_L\rightarrowπ^0ν\barν)$ using a high-energy secondary neutral beam at the CERN SPS in a successor experiment to NA62. The timescale would require many years; we assume that the experiment would be ready at the start of LHC Run 4. Some preliminary conclusions from our feasibility studies, design challenges faced and sensitivity obtainable for the measurement are here presented.
The GBAR experiment aims at measuring the free fall of antihydrogen atoms in the terrestrial gravitational field. It is located at CERN in the AD area. It is the first experiment which has been connected to the ELENA low energy antiproton ring that started commissioning in the summer of 2018. First tests with antiproton and positron beams were performed in summer and fall of 2018. The status and plans of the experiment are described in this document.
The ForwArd Search ExpeRiment (FASER) is an experiment searching for new light and weakly-interacting particles at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. FASER is composed of different sub-detectors, including silicon microstrip detectors, scintillator counters and an electromagnetic calorimeter. In this paper, a new preshower detector for the FASER experiment is presented. The new detector, based on monolithic pixel ASICs, will provide excellent spatial and time resolutions and a large charge dynamic range. First results from a prototype chip produced by IHP in 130 nm SiGe BiCMOS technology are shown.
The main physics goal of the NA62 experiment at CERN is to precisely measure the branching ratio of the kaon rare decay $K^+\rightarrow π^+ ν\barν$. This decay is strongly suppressed in the Standard Model and its branching ratio is theoretically calculated with high accuracy. The NA62 experiment is designed to measure this decay rate with an uncertainty better than 10\%. The measurement can be a good probe of new physics phenomena, which can alter the SM decay rate. The NA62 experiment has been successfully launched in October 2014. In this document, after an introduction to the theoretical fr…
The design, construction and test of a charged particle detector made of scintillation counters read by Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPM) is described. The detector, which operates in vacuum and is used as a veto counter in the NA62 experiment at CERN, has a single channel time resolution of 1.14 ns, a spatial resolution of ~2.5 mm and an efficiency very close to 1 for penetrating charged particles.
The NA62 experiment at CERN SPS aims to measure the branching ratio of the ultra-rare kaon decay $K^+\toπ^+ν\barν$ with 10\% precision, collecting $\sim 100$ events, assuming the Standard Model~(SM) branching ratio of $8.4 \times 10^{-11}$, starting in 2016. The NA62 experiment uses a kaon decay-in-flight technique and is exposed to a 750~MHz high-energy unseparated charged hadron beam, in which kaons are a minor component (6\%). Kaon identification is therefore mandatory to reduce the interference of the dominant non-kaon component with the experimental measurements. The NA62 kaon identificat…
The Beam Dump Facility (BDF) is a project for a new facility at CERN dedicated to high intensity beam dump and fixed target experiments. Currently in its design phase, the first aim of the facility is to search for Light Dark Matter and Hidden Sector models with the Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) experiment. At the core of the facility sits a dense target/dump, whose function is to absorb safely the 400 GeV/c Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) beam and to maximize the production of charm and beauty mesons. An average power of 300 kW will be deposited on the target, which will be subjected to u…
To detect or exclude the existence of hidden sector photons or axion like particles, a table-top "microwaves shining through the wall" experiment has been set up at CERN. An overview of the experimental layout is given, the technical challenges involved are reviewed and the measurement procedure including data-evaluation and its results to date are shown.
The NA62 experiment at CERN will measure the branching ratio of the K+ -> pi+ nu nubar decay with a precision of 10%, collecting about 100 events in two years of run. This paper will review the design of the experiment, the strategy for the measurement and the actual status of the installation. Prospects for the data collection and for the measurement of other rare K+ channels will be presented.
The NA62 experiment is a fixed-target experiment at CERN SPS. The main goal of the experiment is to measure the branching ratio of the ultra-rare kaon decay $K^{+}\toπ^{+}ν\barν$. The NA62 detector allows also to study other rare kaon decays and to search for very weakly coupled particles of MeV-GeV mass-scale. The new ANTI-0 hodoscope is proposed and designed to veto events with charged halo particles entering the decay volume. It is now being assembled at CERN. The detector design, the performance simulation and the results of measurements with cosmic rays and test beams for the individual e…
