Electron neutrino tagging through tertiary lepton detection

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel experimental technique for tagging electron neutrinos in multi-GeV sources by detecting tertiary leptons, significantly reducing contamination from certain decay processes using advanced calorimetric and tracking technologies.

Contribution

It introduces a new method utilizing LHC-style calorimetric and tracking detectors in an instrumented decay tunnel to improve electron neutrino identification and background suppression.

Findings

Reduces ue contamination from K_e3 decays by about tenfold.

Achieves ~60% suppression of ue from muon decay-in-flight.

Effective for slow-extraction, moderate power beams.

Abstract

We discuss an experimental technique aimed at tagging electron neutrinos in multi-GeV artificial sources on an event-by-event basis. It exploits in a novel manner calorimetric and tracking technologies developed in the framework of the LHC experiments and of rare kaon decay searches. The setup is suited for slow-extraction, moderate power beams and it is based on an instrumented decay tunnel equipped with tagging units that intercept secondary and tertiary leptons from the bulk of undecayed \pi^+ and protons. We show that the taggers are able to reduce the \nue contamination originating from K_e3 decays by about one order of magnitude. Only a limited suppression (~60%) is achieved for \nue produced by the decay-in-flight of muons; for low beam powers, similar performance as for K_e3 can be reached supplementing the tagging system with an instrumented beam dump.