NuTag: proof-of-concept study for a long-baseline neutrino beam

TL;DR

This paper presents a proof-of-concept for a novel neutrino beamline with tagging capabilities, aiming to reduce systematic uncertainties in neutrino oscillation experiments by enabling precise neutrino kinematic reconstruction.

Contribution

It introduces a new experimental technique for neutrino tagging and demonstrates its feasibility through simulation for long-baseline neutrino experiments.

Findings

Beamline provides a compatible meson beam for spectrometer operation.

Neutrino flux is sufficient for collecting large neutrino samples.

The approach could reduce systematic uncertainties in neutrino measurements.

Abstract

The study of neutrino oscillation at accelerators is limited by systematic uncertainties, in particular on the neutrino flux, cross-section, and energy estimates. These systematic uncertainties could be eliminated by a novel experimental technique: neutrino tagging. This technique relies on a new type of neutrino beamline and its associated instrumentation which would enable the kinematical reconstruction of the neutrinos produced in $\pi^{\pm} \to \mu^{\pm} \nu_\mu$ and $K^{\pm} \to \mu^{\pm} \nu_\mu$ decays. This article presents a proof-of-concept study for such a tagged beamline, aiming to serve a long baseline neutrino experiment exploiting a megaton scale natural water Cherenkov detector. After optimizing the target and the beamline optics to first order, a complete Monte Carlo simulation of the beamline has been performed. The results show that the beamline provides a meson beam compatible with the operation of the spectrometer, and delivers a neutrino flux sufficient to collect neutrino samples with a size comparable with similar experiments and with other un-tagged long-baseline neutrino experimental proposals.