Heavy Neutral Leptons (HNLs) are hypothetical particles predicted by many extensions of the Standard Model. These particles can, among other things, explain the origin of neutrino masses, generate the observed matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe and provide a dark matter candidate. The SHiP experiment will be able to search for HNLs produced in decays of heavy mesons and travelling distances ranging between O(50 m) and tens of kilometers before decaying. We present the sensitivity of the SHiP experiment to a number of HNL's benchmark models and provide a way to calculate the SHiP's sensitivity to HNLs for arbitrary patterns of flavour mixings. The corresponding tools and data files are also made publicly available.

The Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) Collaboration has shown that the CERN SPS accelerator with its 400 GeV/c proton beam offers a unique opportunity to explore the Hidden Sector [1–3]. The proposed experiment is an intensity frontier experiment which is capable of searching for hidden particles through both visible decays and through scattering signatures from recoil of electrons or nuclei. The high-intensity experimental facility developed by the SHiP Collaboration is based on a number of key features and developments which provide the possibility of probing a large part of the parameter space for a wide range of models with light long-lived super-weakly interacting particles with masses up to 𝒪(10) GeV/c2 in an environment of extremely clean background conditions. This paper describes the proposal for the experimental facility together with the most important feasibility studies. The paper focuses on the challenging new ideas behind the beam extraction and beam delivery, the proton beam dump, and the suppression of beam-induced background.

The existence of non-zero neutrino masses points to the likely existence of multiple SM neutral fermions. When such states are heavy enough that they cannot be produced in oscillations, they are referred to as Heavy Neutral Leptons (HNLs). In this white paper we discuss the present experimental status of HNLs including colliders, beta decay,

SHiP is a proposed high-intensity beam dump experiment set to operate at the CERN SPS. It is expected to have an unprecedented sensitivity to a variety of models containing feebly interacting particles, such as Heavy Neutral Leptons (HNLs). Two HNLs or more could successfully explain the observed neutrino masses through the seesaw mechanism. If, in addition, they are quasi-degenerate, they could be responsible for the baryon asymmetry of the Universe. Depending on their mass splitting, HNLs can have very different phenomenologies: they can behave as Majorana fermions-with lepton number violating (LNV) signatures, such as same-sign dilepton decays-or as Dirac fermions with only lepton number conserving (LNC) signatures. In this work, we quantitatively demonstrate that LNV processes can be distinguished from LNC ones at SHiP, using only the angular distribution of the HNL decay products. Accounting for spin correlations in the simulation and using boosted decision trees for discrimination, we show that SHiP will be able to distinguish Majorana-like and Dirac-like HNLs in a significant fraction of the currently unconstrained parameter space. If the mass splitting is of order 10 −6 eV, SHiP could even be capable of resolving HNL oscillations, thus providing a direct measurement of the mass splitting. This analysis highlights the potential of SHiP to not only search for feebly interacting particles, but also perform model selection.

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