The SHiP experiment at CERN

Abstract

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.