Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP)
The SHiP Experiment is a proposed fixed-target experiment at the CERN North-Area SPS beam dump facility. It is designed to search for weakly interacting particles with a mass in the range of a few hundred MeV to a few GeV and a lifetime of up to a few milliseconds. Those particles cannot be measured at the currently existing high-energy collider experiments located at the LHC, since they would travel several tens of meters without interacting before decaying into known Standard Model particles. The SHiP experiment is designed to probe large areas in the unexplored phase space of these particles. On September 18th of 202412, the SHiP experiment was approved by the CERN Research Board and is expected to be built in the next years with plans to gather the first data around 2031.
Project Timeline
- 2013: Letter of Intent submitted to CERN Advisory Committee
- 2015: Technical Proposal submitted to CERN Research Board
- 2019: Comprehensive Design Study Report published
- 2022 - 2023: Updates on the proposal for the SHiP experiment in the ECN3 cavern
- September 2024: Formal approval by the CERN Research board. The project is now in a technical design and preparation phase
- 2024 - 2030: Technical design, detector construction, facility setup and commissioning
- 2026: Technical Design Reports for Beam Dump Facility and detectors
- 2031: Scheduled start of operation