Overview of Beam Dump Facility and SHiP experiment at CERN

by Mirkoantonio Casolino (CERN)

Friday 16 Nov 2018, 11:00 → 12:30 Europe/Madrid

IFAE Seminar Room

SHiP is a new general purpose fixed target facility, proposed at the CERN SPS accelerator. It requires a target complex (Beam Dump Facility) in which a dense target/dump will be installed, capable of absorbing the entire energy of the beam extracted from the SPS accelerator and integrating $2\times 10^{20}$ p.o.t. in 5 years. A dedicated detector located downstream of the target, based on a long vacuum tank followed by a spectrometer and particle identification detectors, will allow probing a variety of models with light long-lived exotic particles and masses below O(10) GeV/c$^2$. The main focus will be the physics of the so-called Hidden Portals, i.e. search for 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 kaon and the charm meson mass, a coupling range for which Baryogenesis and active neutrino masses could also be explained. Direct detection of light and long-lived SUSY particles, such as RPV neutralinos and pseudo-Dirac gauginos could also be performed in an unexplored parameter range. Another dedicated detector, based on the Emulsion Cloud Chamber technology already used in the OPERA experiment, will allow to study active neutrino cross-sections and angular distributions. In particular measurements of the tau neutrino deep inelastic scattering cross section will be performed with a statistics 1000 times larger than currently available, with the extraction of the $F_4$ and $F_5$ structure functions, never measured so far. Tau neutrinos will be distinguished from tau anti-neutrinos, thus providing the first direct observation of the tau anti-neutrino.

Seminar_Casolino_IFAE_v0 - Copia.pptx