Search for Hidden Particles Experiment

The Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) is an approved fixed-target experiment at CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), which will explore and seek to exceed the limits of known physics at the highest intensities.

The SHiP experiment in the ECN3 cavern, seen from the side.

The experiment traces its origin to an Expression of Interest released in October 2013 to the SPS Council (SPSC). Following this, a Technical Proposal was submitted in April 2015, describing the experimental and detector facility, and a Comprehensive Design Study was completed during 2016–19. In 2020, the update to the European Strategy for Particle Physics denied funding for the construction of the Beam Dump Facility (BDF) that was to host SHiP. This forced the collaboration to seek another site, eventually determining that ECN3 in CERN’s North Area was the only suitable location. BDF and SHiP were approved in 2024, and the experiment will begin in 2033.

SHiP also plans to add to the domain of tau neutrino physics. Of the three neutrino flavours, the tau neutrino is by far the least studied, with only a handful of candidate events recorded. SHiP would deliver tens of thousands of tau and anti-tau neutrinos every year, bringing forward the era of tau neutrino phenomenology.

The BDF facility working group and the SHiP collaboration are working towards this physics output, prototyping the detectors and running test beam campaigns for the various subsystems that make up the experiment.