SHIP is a new general purpose fixed target facility, whose Technical Proposal has been recently
reviewed by the CERN SPS Committee. It recommended that the experiment proceed further to
a Comprehensive Design phase. In its initial phase, the 400 GeV proton beam extracted from
the SPS will be dumped on a heavy target with the aim of integrating 2 × 10 20 POT (Protons On
Target) in 5 years. A dedicated detector, based on a long vacuum tank followed by a spectrometer
and particle identification detectors, will allow probing a variety of models with light long-lived
exotic particles and masses below O(10) GeV/c 2 . The main focus will be the physics of the
so-called Hidden Portals. The sensitivity to Heavy Neutrinos will allow to probe for the first time
the mass range between the kaon and the charm meson mass, and a range of couplings for which
Baryogenesis and active neutrino masses could also be explained. Another dedicated detector
will allow the study of neutrino cross-sections and angular distributions. ν τ deep inelastic scattering cross sections will be measured with a statistics 1000 times larger than currently available,
allowing the extraction of the F 4 and F 5 structure functions, never measured so far.