Optimising the active muon shield for the SHiP experiment at CERN

The SHiP experiment is designed to search for very weakly interacting particles beyond the Standard Model which are produced in a 400 GeV/c proton beam dump at the CERN SPS. The critical challenge for this experiment is to keep the Standard Model background level negligible. In the beam dump, around $10^{11}$ muons will be produced per second. The muon rate in the spectrometer has to be reduced by at least four orders of magnitude to avoid muon-induced backgrounds. It is demonstrated that new improved active muon shield may be used to magnetically deflect the muons out of the acceptance of the spectrometer.