Andrey Golutvin is a Professor at Imperial College London, Doctor of Physics and Mathematics. He is a globally renowned specialist in the area of elementary particle physics. Under his direct guidance, a series of studies of third-generation lepton features were conducted, and B-meson oscillations were discovered. A large value of B-meson oscillations opens up great opportunities for examining the phenomenon of CP-parity non-preservation, which resulted in creating specialized B-mezon factories and installing LHCb on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the European Nuclear Research Organization (CERN). He made a significant contribution to developing the methodologies of fast, radiation-protected scintillation electromagnetic calorimeters. Under his direct guidance, the LHCb unit was successfully launched, and several most exact results of checking a standard model in heavy quark decays globally were obtained. He is a regular speaker at international conferences, including with his plenary reports at the largest, so-called Rochester Conferences on High Energy Physics in 2000 and 2010. He gave lectures at the Department of Elementary Particle Physics at MIPT and currently gives lectures at Imperial College London as a professor for the Department of High Energy Physics.Andrey focused on searches for new fundamental particles which are very weakly-interacting. Motivated by the lack of evidence for new heavy particles, he proposed the Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) experiment to search for light, new particles in 2013 and this is currently his main research activity.

The SHiP experiment has a window of opportunity to lead to fundamental findings on a timescale of < 10 years. The potential discovery of New Physics by SHiP may lead to a complete change of direction in high energy physics and, in particular, may prove that newhigh energy colliders are not needed to uncover the origin of neutrino masses, dark matter, and baryon asymmetry of the Universe.SHiP has instigated a number of pioneering developments that make it possible to construct a large-scale, background-free, high-precision detector operating in beam-dump mode with the full power of the SPS accelerator at CERN. This puts SHiP in an outstanding position world-wide to make a break-through in the domain of particle masses and couplings that are not accessible to the energy and precision frontier experiments, and potentially find the particles that lead to neutrino masses and oscillations, explain baryon asymmetry of the Universe, and shed new light on the properties of dark matter.

SHiP has received a large amount of attention from the particle physics community ever since its inception. In the 2019-2020 update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics, Dark Matter and Feebly Interacting Particles took a prominent position for the first time, and SHiP was ranked as a mature and competitive project ready for implementation. The preparatory evaluation of experiments complementary to the high energy frontier, singled out SHiP and the associated Beam Dump Facility (BDF) as a major potential player in the search for Feebly Interacting Particles.

SHiP is currently a collaboration of 53 institutes and 4 associated institutes, in total representing 18 countries, CERN and JINR. Currently, SHiP’s central challenge consists in finding the resources required to take advantage of the time-limited opportunity that exists to launch SHiP’s data-taking before the end of this decade. The total cost of the project is about 220 MCHF, including 150 MCHF for the Beam Dump Facility and 70 MCHF for the SHiP detector.

CERN committees have endorsed the SHiP science case. In order to obtain the seal of approval to the project and start the construction of the BDF, three key concepts have to be proven with prototypes, namely the ultra-high efficiency for slow extraction and delivery of the SPS beam, the extreme conditions for the high-density proton target, and the unprecedented background suppression through the use of an active muon shield. The CERN Medium Term Plan of this year allocates sufficient resources to complete the R&D studies of the beam line and the target. The construction of the muon shield prototype and study of its performance is led by the group from Imperial College London and requires funding at the level of ~3 MCHF during next 2-3 years.