VERY LONG BASELINE NEUTRINO OSCILLATION EXPERIMENTS FOR PRECISE MEASURMENTS OF OSCILLATION PARAMETERS AND SEARCH FOR N MU YIELDS N EPSILON.

Abstract

Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators started a neutrino working group to identify new opportunities in the field of neutrino oscillations and explore how our laboratory facilities can be used to explore this field of research. The memo to the working group and the charge are included in Appendix I. This report is the result of the deliberations of the working group. Previously, we wrote a letter of intent to build a new high intensity neutrino beam at BNL. A new intense proton beam will be used to produce a conventional horn focused neutrino beam directed at a detector located in either the Homestake mine in Lead, South Dakota at 2540 km or the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, NM at 2880 km. As a continuation of the study that produced the letter of intent, this report examines several items in more detail. We mainly concentrate on the use of water Cherenltov detectors because of their size, resolution, and background rejection capability, and cost. We examine the prospects of building such a detector in the Homestake mine. The accelerator upgrade will be carried out in phases. We expect the first phase to yield a 0.4 MW proton beam andmore » the second phase to result in a 1.0 MW beam. The details of this upgrade will be reported in a companion report. In this report we assume accelerator intensity of 1 MW for calculating event rates and spectra. We also assume a total experimental duration of 5 years with running time of 10{sup 7} seconds per year. We examine the target station and the horn produced neutrino beam with focus on two topics: target and horn design for a 1 MW beam and the broad band spectrum of neutrinos from a 28 GeV proton beam.« less