Development of proton beam irradiation system for the NA65/DsTau experiment

Abstract

Tau neutrino is the least studied lepton of the Standard Model (SM). The NA65/DsTau experiment targets to investigate Ds , the parent particle of the ντ , using the nuclear emulsion-based detector and to decrease the systematic uncertainty of ντ flux prediction from over 50 % to 10 % for future beam dump experiments. In the experiment, the emulsion detectors are exposed to the CERN SPS 400 GeV proton beam. To provide optimal conditions for the reconstruction of interactions, the protons are required to be uniformly distributed over the detector's surface with an average density of 105 cm-2 and the fluctuation of less than 10%. To address this issue, we developed a new proton irradiation system called the target mover. The new target mover provided irradiation with a proton density of 1.01 × 105 cm-2 and the density fluctuation of 1.9 ± 0.3% in the DsTau 2021 run.

NA65(DsTau): study of tau neutrino production in p-A interactions

“…The entire module is placed on a servo-driven motorized stage (Figure 2) that adjusts its position based on the beam intensity, ensuring more uniform irradiation of the emulsion films [5].…”