HIBEAM at the ESS

Research Project, 2021 – 2023

A proposal is made for pre-studies for the HIBEAM instrument at the European Spallation Source. The HIBEAM program addresses major open questions in modern physics : the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry and the nature of dark matter.

The purpose of the proposal is to design an instrument with instrumentation such that a suite of searches for neutron conversions to anti-neutrons and/or sterile neutrons can be performed. The two year program of work is split into four categories - beamline design and optimization, design and prototype of detectors for neutron-antineutron conversion searches, and the design of neutron detectors for dedicated sterile neutron searches. The work brings together world-leading expertise from four Swedish institutes (Stockholm, Uppsala and Lund Universities and Chalmers Institute of Technology) and external scientists from the Institut Laue Langevin in Grenoble and Tennessee University, respectively. The work studies HIBEAM on a beamline of the ANNI design as well as the possibility of deploying HIBEAM on an ESS test beamline. Participants from the Institut Langevin and Tennessee University also contribute.  The project addresses the major design questions for HIBEAM ahead of a proposal. Involving also university engineering teams, the work will enable an accurate costing.