Eur. Phys. J. C 69, 331-339 (2010)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-010-1410-7

Electron neutrino tagging through tertiary lepton detection

¹ I.N.F.N., Sezione di Roma Sapienza, Rome, Italy
² I.N.F.N., Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, Frascati (Rome), Italy

francesco.terranova@cern.ch

Received: 21 April 2010
Revised: 13 June 2010
Published online: 11 August 2010

Abstract

We discuss an experimental technique aimed at tagging electron neutrinos in multi-GeV artificial sources on an event-by-event basis. It exploits in a novel manner calorimetric and tracking technologies developed in the framework of the LHC experiments and of rare kaon decay searches. The setup is suited for slow-extraction, moderate power beams and it is based on an instrumented decay tunnel equipped with tagging units that intercept secondary and tertiary leptons from the bulk of undecayed π ⁺ and protons. We show that the taggers are able to reduce the ν _e contamination originating from K _e3 decays by about one order of magnitude. Only a limited suppression (∼60%) is achieved for ν _e produced by the decay-in-flight of muons; for low beam powers, similar performance as for K _e3 can be reached supplementing the tagging system with an instrumented beam dump.