The NA61/SHINE long target pilot analysis for T2K

TL;DR

This paper reports on the NA61/SHINE experiment's measurements of hadron production from a full-size T2K replica target at CERN, enabling improved neutrino flux predictions for the T2K experiment through comprehensive phase space coverage.

Contribution

It presents the first complete measurement of pion yields from a full-size T2K target replica, enhancing neutrino flux modeling for T2K.

Findings

High-quality long target data were successfully collected.

T2K neutrino flux predictions can now be re-weighted using NA61/SHINE data.

Full phase space coverage achieved for the first time in a single experiment.

Abstract

The NA61/SHINE collaboration performed measurements of pC interactions at 31 GeV/c beam momentum with a full size replica of the T2K target (1.9 interaction length) during a pilot run in 2007. Larger statistics runs were also conducted in 2009 and 2010. The NA61/SHINE setup consists in a large acceptance spectrometer located on the H2 beamline of the SPS at CERN. For the first time, the kinematical phase space of interest for an accelerator based neutrino experiment (i.e. kinematical phase space of pions/kaons exiting the target and producing neutrinos in the direction of the near and far detectors) is fully covered by a single hadron production experiment. In a first stage, yields of positively charged pions were measured at the surface of the target. The analysis of the 2007 data set presented here demonstrates that a) high quality long target data were successfully taken with the NA61/SHINE apparatus, and b) for the first time, the T2K neutrino flux predictions can effectively be re-weighted with the NA61/SHINE long target data.