CERN Accelerating science

The BDF/SHiP experiment has been proposed as a general purpose intensity-frontier experiment for the search of feebly interacting GeV-scale particles and to perform neutrino physics measurements at the CERN SPS. After the Technical Proposal in 2015 and a subsequent comprehensive design study, it has recently been optimized to operate in the existing SPS ECN3 underground facility, taking full advantage of the available 4x10^19 protons per year at 400 GeV.

The experimental setup consists of two complementary detectors downstream an active muon shield. The magnetic muon shield is placed directly after the target region and is designed to deflect muons produced in the beam dump and thus reduce the flux in the detector acceptance to an acceptable level. The first detector system, the scattering and neutrino detector (SND), consists of a light dark matter (LDM) / neutrino target with vertexing capability in the form of tungsten plates, alternated with emulsion films and fast electronic detector planes, followed by a muon spectrometer.

The second detector system, the hidden sector decay spectrometer (HSDS), consists of a 50 m long decay volume followed by a large spectrometer, a timing detector and a PID system. The main requirement to the HSDS is the efficient control and suppression of the different backgrounds, which is ensured by two key features, namely maintaining the decay volume at a pressure of  1 mbar and instrumenting the vessel walls by a system of high-efficiency background taggers.

This unique setup offers a generic sensitivity to decay and scattering signatures of models with feebly interacting particles, such as dark-sector mediators and light dark matter. In neutrino physics, BDF/SHiP can perform unprecedented measurements with tau neutrinos and neutrino-induced charm production. In this seminar, an update of the BDF/SHiP experimental setup will be presented, focusing on the challenges and technologies of the individual sub-detectors and their performance.

Coffee will be served at 10:30.