Abstract
We present a novel method to accurately determine the flux of neutrinos and antineutrinos, one of the dominant systematic uncertainty affecting current and future long-baseline neutrino experiments, as well as precision neutrino scattering experiment. Using exclusive topologies in ν(ν¯)-hydrogen interactions, νμp→μ−pπ+, ν¯μp→μ+pπ−, and ν¯μp→μ+n with small hadronic energy, we achieve an overall accuracy on the relative fluxes better than 1% in the energy range covering most of the available flux. Since we cannot rely on simulations nor model corrections at this level of precision, we present techniques to constrain all relevant systematic uncertainties using data themselves. The method can be implemented using the approach we recently proposed to collect high statistics samples of ν(ν¯)-hydrogen interactions in a low-density and high-resolution detector, which could serve as part of the near detector complex in a long-baseline neutrino experiment, as well as a dedicated beam monitoring detector.
Highlights
The unprecedented intensity available at modern wide-bandneutrino facilities allows the use of high resolution detectors with a relatively small fiducial mass of a few tons to achieve an accurate reconstruction ofneutrino interactions, alleviating one of the primary limitations of past experiments
In the energy ranges where we expect the bulk of the fluxes the total uncertainties – including both the statistical and systematic ones added in quadrature – are well below 1%
We proposed a novel method to achieve a precise determination of relative and absolute νμ and νμ fluxes using exclusive νμp → μ−pπ+, νμp → μ+pπ−, and νμp → μ+n processes on hydrogen with small energy transfer ν
Summary
The unprecedented intensity available at modern wide-band (anti)neutrino facilities allows the use of high resolution detectors with a relatively small fiducial mass of a few tons to achieve an accurate reconstruction of (anti)neutrino interactions, alleviating one of the primary limitations of past experiments. Unlike charged lepton scattering experiments, the (anti)neutrino probe has to face the intrinsic limitation that the energy of the incoming (anti)neutrino is unknown on an event-by-event basis. Since (anti)neutrino experiments need to use nuclear targets to collect a sizable statistics, nuclear effects introduce a substantial smearing on the measured distributions, resulting in additional systematic uncertainties. For these reasons all (anti)neutrino scattering experiments have been limited by a poor knowledge of the incident flux. An accurate knowledge of the (anti)neutrino flux is a necessary condition to exploit the unique features of the (anti)neutrino probe for precision measurements of fundamental interactions. The flux uncertainties are the dominant systematic uncertainties in current and future long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments
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