The active muon shield in the SHiP experiment

• Published in: Journal of instrumentation Vol. 12; no. 5; p. P05011
• Main Authors: Akmete, A., Alexandrov, A., Anokhina, A., Aoki, S., Atkin, E., Azorskiy, N., Back, J.J., Bagulya, A., Baranov, A., Barker, G.J., Bay, A., Bayliss, V., Bencivenni, G., Berdnikov, A.Y., Berdnikov, Y.A., Bertani, M., Betancourt, C., Bezshyiko, I., Bezshyyko, O., Bick, D., Bieschke, S., Blanco, A., Boehm, J., Bogomilov, M., Bondarenko, K., Bonivento, W.M., Boyarsky, A., Brenner, R., Breton, D., Brundler, R., Bruschi, M., Büscher, V., Buonaura, A., Buontempo, S., Cadeddu, S., Calcaterra, A., Campanelli, M., Chauveau, J., Chepurnov, A., Chernyavsky, M., Choi, K.-Y., Chumakov, A., Ciambrone, P., Dallavalle, G.M., D'Ambrosio, N., D'Appollonio, G., Lellis, G. De, Roeck, A. De, Serio, M. De, Dedenko, L., Crescenzo, A. Di, Marco, N. Di, Dib, C., Dijkstra, H., Dmitrenko, V., Domenici, D., Donskov, S., Dubreuil, A., Ebert, J., Enik, T., Etenko, A., Fabbri, F., Fabbri, L., Fedin, O., Fedorova, G., Felici, G., Ferro-Luzzi, M., Fini, R.A., Fonte, P., Franco, C., Fukuda, T., Galati, G., Gavrilov, G., Gerlach, S., Golinka-Bezshyyko, L., Golubkov, D., Golutvin, A., Gorbunov, D., Gorbunov, S., Gorkavenko, V., Gornushkin, Y., Gorshenkov, M., Grachev, V., Graverini, E., Grichine, V., Guler, A. M., Guz, Yu, Hagner, C., Hakobyan, H., Herwijnen, E. van, Hollnagel, A., Hosseini, B., Hushchyn, M., Iaselli, G., Iuliano, A., Jacobsson, R., Jonker, M., Kadenko, I., Kamiscioglu, C., Kamiscioglu, M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bristol IOP Publishing 17.05.2017
• Subjects: Combinatorial analysis; Detector design and construction technologies and materials; Experiments; High Energy Physics - Experiment; Instrumentation and Detectors; Muons; Optimization; Performance of High Energy Physics Detectors; Physics; Proton beams; Standard model (particle physics); Synchrotrons; p: beam dump; muon: shielding; CERN SPS; new physics; performance; background; spectrometer
• ISSN: 1748-0221; 1748-0221
• DOI: 10.1088/1748-0221/12/05/P05011

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. An essential task for the experiment is to keep the Standard Model background level to less than 0.1 event after 2×1020 protons on target. In the beam dump, around 1011 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 combinatorial background. A novel active muon shield is used to magnetically deflect the muons out of the acceptance of the spectrometer. This paper describes the basic principle of such a shield, its optimization and its performance.