SHiP has been selected as the new flagship project of the CERN Physics Beyond Colliders intensity frontier, featuring a dedicated Beam Dump Facility at CERN’s North Area ECN3 to exploit the full potential of the 400GeV SPS proton beam. The experiment will be realized by a two-fold detector setup enabling a diverse physics program: While the Hidden Sector detector is going to study the decay of Heavy Neutral Leptons, Axion-Like Particles, and other Feebly-Interacting Particles in a broad range of masses and coupling inaccessible to colliders, the upstream Scattering and Neutrino Detector will enable a direct search for Light Dark Matter, as well as measurements in neutrino physics with unprecedented precision. With the detector located closely downstream of the dense proton target, a major challenge will be the reduction of beam-related backgrounds. Following the hadron stopper, a magnetic muon shield will deflect most of these particles from the detector acceptance, and the 50m-long Hidden Sector decay volume will be enveloped by a Surrounding Background Tagger.
This talk will give an overview of the physics capabilities and detector technologies of the proposed experiment, and also provide in-depth details of the R&D process for the Liquid Scintillator Surrounding Background Tagger.