HARP: a hadron production experiment for the neutrino factory and for the atmospheric neutrino flux

Physics Performance of the Barrel RPC System of the HARP Experiment

“…From these distributions the mean values of the difference of the recorded and predicted particle ToF time have been obtained in QDC units wide bins of measured charge. The variation of these mean values with the signal charge is well approximated with the function: (1) where is the time delay and is the measured charge. It has been observed that the signals from and exhibit a very similar time-charge dependence (as expected), while signals induced by protons behave differently.…”

“…T HE HARP experiment [1], [2] has been designed to measure hadron production cross-sections on fixed targets with a precision of a few percent over almost the full solid angle. A set of solid and liquid targets spanning a large range in atomic number was exposed to beams of protons and pions with momenta between 1.5 GeV/c and 15 GeV/c.…”

“…1. A detailed description of the detector and its performance are given in [1], [2]. The spectrometer can be subdivided into three main systems:…”

A measurement of hadron production cross sections for the simulation of accelerator neutrino beams and a search for muon-neutrino to electron-neutrino oscillations in the Δm² about equals 1-eV² region

“…The first proposed [54] goal of the HARP experiment is to contribute to optimization studies in the design of a future Neutrino Factory [49]. The front end of a Neutrino Factory would include a high intensity proton beam focused onto a high Z nuclear target for the copious production of secondary charged pions.…”

“…Several modern hadron production experiments have been built in recent years to measure the secondary production for these beamlines including the Hadron Production (HARP) [54] experiment at CERN, the NA49 [99] experiment also at CERN and the Main Injector Particle Production (MIPP) [98] experiment at Fermilab. The MIPP and NA49 experiments are well suited to measure production at higher proton energies while the HARP experiment collected data for E p ≤ 15 GeV.…”