A timing detector for the SHiP experiment

SHiP is a proposed general purpose fixed target experiment to be located at the CERN SPS accelerator. A fixed target station will be followed by magnetic shielding to reduce beam induced background, a dedicated tau neutrino detector and a detector to search for hidden particles beyond the Standard Model. Background taggers and a dedicated timing detector will ensure sufficient background rejection. The timing detector is required to have a timing resolution of 100 ps or less in order to reduce combinatorial di-muon background to an acceptable level. A proposed option for such a timing detector consists of plastic scintillating bars read out on each end by silicon photomultipliers, which is the focus of this study. We report on recent testbeam results carried out at CERN on single bars read out by an array of silicon photomultipliers and present a design for a prototype of the SHiP timing detector.