The NESSiE way to searches for sterile neutrinos at FNAL

TL;DR

The paper discusses the NESSiE experiment proposal at FNAL to search for sterile neutrinos through muon-neutrino disappearance measurements using magnetic spectrometers at two sites, aiming to clarify anomalies related to neutrino oscillations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental setup with magnetic spectrometers at FNAL to investigate sterile neutrinos and addresses hardware and scheduling constraints for the proposed measurements.

Findings

Design of a two-site magnetic spectrometer experiment at FNAL.

Potential to clarify muon-neutrino disappearance anomalies.

Compatibility with existing FNAL infrastructure and projects.

Abstract

Neutrino physics is nowadays receiving more and more attention as a possible source of information for the long-standing problem of new physics beyond the Standard Model. The recent measurement of the mixing angle $\theta_{13}$ in the standard mixing oscillation scenario encourages us to pursue the still missing results on leptonic CP violation and absolute neutrino masses. However, puzzling measurements exist that deserve an exhaustive evaluation. The NESSiE Collaboration has been setup to undertake conclusive experiments to clarify the muon-neutrino disappearance measurements at small $L/E$, which will be able to put severe constraints to models with more than the three-standard neutrinos, or even to robustly measure the presence of a new kind of neutrino oscillation for the first time. To this aim the use of the current FNAL-Booster neutrino beam for a Short-Baseline experiment has been carefully evaluated. Its recent proposal refers to the use of magnetic spectrometers at two different sites, Near and Far ones. Their positions have been extensively studied, together with the possible performances of two OPERA-like spectrometers. The proposal is constrained by availability of existing hardware and a time-schedule compatible with the undergoing project of a multi-site Liquid-Argon detectors at FNAL. The experiment to be possibly setup at Booster will allow to definitively clarify the current $\nu_{\mu}$ disappearance tension with $\nu_{e}$ appearance and disappearance at the eV mass scale.