SHiP: a new facility for searching for long-lived neutral particles and studying the tau neutrino properties

SHiP (Search for Hidden Particles) is a new general purpose fixed target facility, proposed at the CERN SPS accelerator. In its initial phase, the 400 GeV proton beam will be dumped on a heavy target, integrating $2\times 10^{20}$ protons on target in 5 years. A dedicated detector located downstream of the target, based on a long vacuum tank and a spectrometer and particle identification detectors, will allow probing a variety of models with light long-lived neutral and very weakly interacting particles and masses below 10 GeV. 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 the baryon asymmetry of the Universe could 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 neutrino differential cross sections. 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 observation of the tau anti-neutrino.