Dr Matei Climecu - The SHiP experiment: the flagship to probe hidden sectors

Wednesday 3 Dec 2025, 12:00 → 15:00 Europe/London

610 (G.O. Jones Bulding)

https://cern.zoom.us/j/68995045975?pwd=fdpw3jZ4ZPU61gbaTtDASbS03qKbf4.1

About the speaker: 

Dr Matei Climecu completed his Bachelor of Mathematics at EPFL between 2012 and 2015, before expanding his academic path into experimental physics. He earned his Bachelor of Physics from Université Blaise Pascal in 2016, where he carried out his bachelor thesis within the ALICE experiment He continued his training at the University of Bonn, completing a Master’s degree in Physics in 2019 with a thesis focused on charm production studies for the SHiP experiment. Dr Climecu went on to pursue his doctoral work at the University of Mainz from 2020 to 2025. His PhD research covered calorimetry development for SHiP and contributed to the first observation of electron neutrinos in emulsion with the SND@LHC experiment.

13:30 → 14:00 Biscuits/Coffee/Socialization

14:00 → 15:00 The SHiP experiment: the flagship to probe hidden sectors

The Standard Model of particle physics is known to be incomplete; well-motivated extensions to it include low-coupling new physics such as Heavy Neutral Leptons, axion-like particles, and extra scalars. The Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) is a general-purpose experiment designed to access new regions of phase space by leveraging a high-intensity beam dump at HI-ECN3's Beam Dump Facility using 4x10^19 400 GeV CERN SPS protons on target per year of operation. The detector apparatus consists of two complementary sections: on the one hand, a Scattering Neutrino Detector will observe large fluxes of all flavors of neutrinos, search for light dark matter as well as measure nuclear parton distribution and structure functions; on the other hand, a hidden sector decay spectrometer followed by timing and PID detectors will allow to probe never-before explored areas of phase space for new physics at the low-coupling frontier across a wide variety of models. SHiP at the Beam Dump Facility thus offers an unprecedented sensitivity to decay and scattering signatures of various new physics models and tau neutrino physics.

Convener: Dr Matei Climecu (Ghent University)

HI-ECN3_SHiP.mp4

SHiP_climescu_QMU.pdf