Detecting tau-neutrino appearance in the spectra of quasielastic CC events

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to detect tau-neutrino appearance in long-baseline experiments by comparing far-to-near ratios of quasielastic CC event spectra, which is feasible with large calorimeters and limited mainly by statistical uncertainties.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel approach for identifying tau-neutrino appearance using spectral ratio comparisons in quasielastic CC events.

Findings

Method is feasible with large calorimeters like MINOS.

Detection limited mainly by statistical uncertainties.

Applicable to long-baseline accelerator experiments.

Abstract

A method for detecting the transition numu->nutau in long-baseline accelerator experiments, that consists in comparing the far-to-near ratios of the spectra of quasielastic CC events generated by high- and low-energy beams of muon neutrinos, is proposed. The test may be accessible to big calorimeters with muon spectrometry like MINOS, and is limited by statistics rather than systematics.