Neutrino factories

Abstract

The Neutrino Factory is a facility that produces neutrino beams with a well-defined flavour content and energy spectrum from the decay of intense, high-energy, stored muon beams to establish CP violation in the neutrino sector. The International Design Study for the Neutrino Factory (the IDS-NF) is providing a Reference Design Report (RDR) for the facility. The present design is optimised for the recent measurements of θ13. The accelerator facility will deliver 1021 muon decays per year from 10 GeV stored muon beams. The straight sections of the storage ring point to a 100 kton Magnetised Iron Neutrino Detector (MIND) at a distance of 2000-2500 km from the source. The accuracy in the value of δCP that a Neutrino Factory can achieve and the δCP coverage is unrivalled by other future facilities. Staging scenarios for the Neutrino Factory deliver facilities that can carry out physics at each stage. In the context of Fermilab, such a scenario would imply in the first stage the construction of a small storage ring, nuSTORM, to carry out neutrino cross-section and sterile neutrino measurements and to perform a programme of 6D muon cooling R&D. The second stage is the construction of a 5 GeV Neutrino Factory (nuMAX) pointing to the Sanford Underground Research Facility at Homestake and the final stage would use many of the components of this facility to construct a Muon Collider, initially as a 126 GeV CM Higgs Factory, which may be upgraded to a multi-TeV Muon Collider if required.