Heavy Flavour Cascade Production in a Beam Dump

SHiP will use a 400~GeV/c proton beam impinging on a several interaction length long Molybdenum target. Heavy flavour hadrons produced in the dump can decay semi-leptonically, which can produce both the Heavy Neutral Leptons as signal, but also potential background from muons and neutrinos. The absolute rate of heavy flavour production is taken from measurements. Pythia is used to predict the phase space distribution of the charm and beauty hadrons which are produced both in the primary interaction of the 400~GeV/c proton and in interactions of the secondaries produced in the cascade. The full cascade production of both HNL and background is compared to that reported in the SHiP Technical Proposal, where only the primary $pN$ interactions were taken into account.