Charm production x-sections

Abstract

During the years 1994-97, the emulsion target of the CHORUS detector was exposed to the wide-band neutrino beam of the CERN SPS of 27 GeV average neutrino energy. In total about 100, 000 charged-current neutrino interactions with at least one identified muon were located in the nuclear emulsion target and fully reconstructed, using newly developed automatic scanning systems. Charmed particles were searched for by a program recognizing particle decays. This technique, based on the observation of the decay in nuclear emulsion, allows the selection of a sample with very low background and minimal kinematical bias. 2013 charged-current interactions with a charmed hadron in the final state were selected and confirmed through visual inspection. Some of the CHORUS measurements and their implications for future neutrino experiments are discussed in this paper.