Neutrino factory

Abstract

The properties of the neutrino provide a unique window on physics beyond that described by the standard model. The study of subleading effects in neutrino oscillations, and the race to discover CPinvariance violation in the lepton sector, has begun with the recent discovery that θ 13 > 0. The measured value of θ 13 is large, emphasizing the need for a facility at which the systematic uncertainties can be reduced to the percent level. The neutrino factory, in which intense neutrino beams are produced from the decay of muons, has been shown to outperform all realistic alternatives and to be capable of making measurements of the requisite precision. Its unique discovery potential arises from the fact that only at the neutrino factory is it practical to produce high-energy electron (anti)neutrino beams of the required intensity. This paper presents the conceptual design of the neutrino factory accelerator facility developed by the European Commission Framework Programme 7 EUROν Design Study consortium. EUROν coordinated the European contributions to the International Design Study for the Neutrino Factory (the IDS-NF) collaboration. The EUROν baseline accelerator facility will provide 10 21 muon decays per year from 12.6 GeV stored muon beams serving a single neutrino detector situated at a source-detector distance of between 1 500 km and 2 500 km. A suite of near detectors will allow definitive neutrino-scattering experiments to be performed.

The ESSnuSB project

“…These accelerated muons could be then stored in a muon storage ring with straight sections. Muons decaying in straight sections would provide a narrow band and beam, as proposed by Neutrino Factory project [9]. As the most advanced option, muons of opposite charges could be collected, cooled and accelerated separately.…”

The MICE Muon Beam on ISIS and the beam-line instrumentation of the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment

“…Muon accelerators are considered potential enablers of fundamental particle physics studies at the energy and intensity frontiers. Such machines have great potential to provide multi-TeV lepton-antilepton collisions at a muon collider [1][2][3] or act as sources of intense neutrino beams with well-characterized fluxes and energy spectra at a neutrino factory [4][5][6].…”

Toroidal magnetized iron neutrino detector for a neutrino factory

“…This fit includes two systematic uncertainties that are assumed to be the leading terms; the error, σ x , on the ratio x of ν toν cross-sections and the error, σ A , on the total counts in the detector A due to fiducial errors or variation in the neutrino beam. The uncertainty in the cross-section ratio is assumed to be measurable to the 1% level at a neutrino factory, as the near detector sites will take concurrent measurements of both the neutrino and anti-neutrino species [29]. Similarly, measurements at the near detector combined with muon decay rate measurements from instrumentation in the muon decay ring should reduce the uncertainty σ A to below 1% [13].…”