Hidden sector searches with SHiP and NA62

Understand

High-intensity proton beams impinging on a fixed target or beam dump allow to probe new physics via the production of new weakly-coupled particles in hadron decays.

• The CERN SPS provides opportunities to do so with the running NA62 experiment and the planned SHiP experiment.
• Reconstruction of kaon decay kinematics (beam mode) allows NA62 to probe for the existence of right-handed neutrinos and dark photons with masses below 0.45 GeV.
• Direct reconstruction of displaced vertices from the decays of new neutral particles (dump mode) will allow NA62 and SHiP to probe right-handed neutrinos with masses up to 5 GeV and mixings down to several orders of magnitude smaller than current constraints, in regions favoured in models which explain at once neutrino masses, matter-antimatter asymmetry and dark matter.