SHiP: a new facility with a dedicated detector to search for new long-lived neutral particles and studying 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 protons beam will be dumped on a heavy target with the aim of integrating 2 × 10 20 protons on target in five years. A dedicated detector downstream of the target will allow us to probe a variety of models with the light long- lived exotic particles and masses below O(10) GeV/c 2 . Another dedicated detector will allow the study of active neutrino cross-sections and angular distributions. In particular, the neutrino deep-inelastic cross-sections 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 by anti-neutrinos, thus providing the first observation of the tau anti-neutrino. With muon neutrinos it will be possible to study the strangeness content of the nucleon.