The Potential for Neutrino Physics at Muon Colliders and Dedicated High Current Muon Storage Rings

Abstract

Conceptual design studies are underway for muon colliders and other high-current muon storage rings that have the potential to become the first true "neutrino factories". Muon decays in long straight sections of the storage rings would produce precisely characterized beams of electron and muon type neutrinos of unprecedented intensity. This article reviews prospects the for these facilities to greatly extend our capabilities for neutrino experiments, largely emphasizing the physics of neutrino interactions.

High-rate neutrino detectors for neutrino factories

“…Polarized targets for spin physics are discussed in section 3, and section 4 introduces the options for high mass detectors to study neutrino-electron scattering. Table 1, which is reproduced from reference [1], displays parameters for examples of the three types of detectors discussed in the following sections. It also gives realistic but very approximate integrated luminosities and event sample sizes for 2 illustrative neutrino factory energies: 50 GeV and 500 GeV.…”

“…A muon beam energy of about 50 GeV is a likely choice for a dedicated muon storage ring [2], with default specifications of 10 20 muon decays per year in the production straight section. Five hundred GeV muons correspond to a 1 TeV center-of-mass muon collider such as, for example, that discussed in reference [1].…”

“…This specific example is reproduced from reference [3] and it illustrates the design considerations that might be shared by other HR detector designs at neutrino factories. A brief overview of its capabilities will be given in this section; the reader is referred to the references [3,1,4] for more in-depth presentations of its anticipated performance capabilities.…”

“…Rather than attempting to derive the performance of this detector for specific physics topics, the rest of this section will simply present plausibility arguments for its potentially wide-ranging physics capabilities at neutrino factories, then quote some more specific conclusions taken from reference [1].…”

“…The charged leptons from CC interactions would of course be well measured and, more crucially, the properties of the struck quark could be inferred from reconstruction of the hadronic jet it produces. In particular, the favorable geometry of closely spaced CCD's in the neutrino target along with their ∼ 3.5 µm typical [5] hit resolutions should provide vertexing of charm and beauty decays that would be superior to any current or planned collider detector [1].…”