Ponente
Descripción
The European Spallation Source (ESS) under construction in Lund, Sweden, is set to become the brightest cold spallation neutron source in the world. Neutrons are produced by a 2 GeV proton beam hitting a tungsten target and moderated in cold and thermal moderators.
The scope of the ESS is to build and operate 22 world-leading instruments out of which 15 will be part of initial operations in 2027. For the remaining 7 instruments, a capability gap analysis performed by the ESS came to the conclusion that a particle physics beamline should be given highest priority.
Several particle physics experiments are currently under development. They include studies of neutron beta decay and hadronic weak interactions, coherent neutrino scattering, neutron EDM measurements and the search of dark matter in the form of mirror matter or axion-like particles. These experiments will be presented and put in the context of the current status of particle physics.
A focus of the talk will be on the HIBEAM/NNBAR program, a high-sensitivity search for free neutron-antineutron oscillations that violate the baryon number by two units. The goal is to improve the currently most stringent limit, obtained the Institute Laue-Langevin, by three orders of magnitude.
