Design and diagnostics of high-precision accelerator neutrino beams

TL;DR

This paper reviews the design and diagnostics of high-precision neutrino beams, emphasizing monitored beams and advanced diagnostics to achieve per-cent level flux and flavor determination, crucial for precision neutrino oscillation studies.

Contribution

It introduces recent techniques and design strategies for monitored neutrino beams and ab-initio energy measurements to enhance control and reduce biases in neutrino experiments.

Findings

Current limitations in neutrino beam diagnostics identified.

Advanced monitoring techniques proposed for flux and flavor determination.

Potential for ab-initio energy measurements to improve cross-section accuracy.

Abstract

Neutrino oscillation physics has entered a new precision era, which poses major challenges to the level of control and diagnostics of the neutrino beams. In this paper, we review the design of high-precision beams, their current limitations, and the latest techniques envisaged to overcome such limits. We put emphasis on "monitored neutrino beams" and advanced diagnostics to determine the flux and flavor of the neutrinos produced at the source at the per-cent level. We also discuss ab-initio measurements of the neutrino energy -- i.e. measurements performed without relying on the event reconstruction at the neutrino detector -- to remove any flux-induced bias in the determination of the cross sections.