The SHiP experiment is being designed to search for extremely feebly interacting, relatively light and long-lived particles, at the intensity frontier. The experiment will be located in a new beam dump facility at CERN where it will use the high-intensity beam of 400 GeV/c protons from the SPS accelerator. Presently SHiP is a CERN recognized collaboration of about 300 Physicists from 54 Institutes and 18 Countries. The experiment is expected to be approved by middle of 2020 to start taking data in 2027.

The main goal of SHiP is to explore the so-called Hidden Sector of particle physics in a region of the phase space that is not accessible to the LHC experiments. A wide variety of models predict the existence of new long-lived and feebly interacting particles, which act as "portals" between the Hidden and Standard Model sectors of particle physics and can accommodate a natural explanation for the origin of neutrino masses and oscillations, the nature of dark matter, the origin of matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe and inflation. SHiP will address all these unanswered mysteries with unprecedented sensitivity, in a mass region below 10 GeV/c², using neutrino (heavy neutral leptons), vector (dark photons), scalar and ALP (Axion-Like Paricles) portals.  The search for light supersymmetric particles is also part of the physics program. SHiP is being proposed as a discovery experiment but it also includes a rich program of tau neutrino physics, measurements on neutrino-induced charm production and the study of the proton structure with neutrino beams.

The LIP-SHiP group was created in 2018 with the aim of developing an RPC based timing detector, to be placed in the Hidden Sector Spectrometer or in the Neutrino Spectrometer, and also to participate in its physics program. Besides the hardware developments, the group is contributing to the study of neutrino-induced and muon-induced backgrounds and also to the implementation in the simulation and reconstruction software of an ALP → γγ. An ALP with a mass of about 1 GeV/c² is regarded as an ideal inflaton candidate. The detection of the above mentioned decay would represent a reproduction in the laboratory of the reheating phase of the early Universe.

 

 

Group webpage at LIP

Group Leader:  

Celso Franco

celso@lip.pt