Description
The Neutrinos from Stored Muons, nuSTORM, facility has been designed to deliver a definitive neutrino-nucleus scattering programme using beams of (anti-)electron and (anti-)muon neutinos from the decay of muons confined within a storage ring. The facility is unique, it will be capable of storing muon beams with a central momentum of between 1 GeV/c and 6 GeV/c and a momentum spread of 16\%. This specification will allow neutrino-scattering measurements to be made over the kinematic range of interest to the DUNE and Hyper-K collaborations. At nuSTORM, the flavour composition of the beam and the neutrino-energy spectrum are both precisely known. The storage-ring instrumentation will allow the neutrino flux to be determined to a precision of 1% or better. By exploiting sophisticated neutrino-detector techniques such as those being developed for the near detectors of DUNE and Hyper-K, the nuSTORM facility will:
- Serve the future long- and short-baseline neutrino-oscillation
programmes by providing definitive measurements of
electron-neutrino-nucleus and muon-neutrino-nucleus scattering
cross-sections with percent-level precision; - Provide a probe that is 100\% polarised and sensitive to isospin to
allow incisive studies of nuclear dynamics and collective effects in
nuclei; - Deliver the capability to extend the search for light sterile
neutrinos beyond the sensitivities that will be provided by the FNAL
Short Baseline Neutrino (SBN) programme; and - Create an essential test facility for the development of muon
accelerators to serve as the basis of a multi-TeV lepton-antilepton
collider.
To maximise its impact, nuSTORM should be implemented such that data-taking begins by ~2027/28 when the DUNE and Hyper-K collaborations will each be accumulating data sets capable of determining oscillation probabilities with percent-level precision.
With its existing proton-beam infrastructure, CERN is uniquely well-placed to implement nuSTORM. The feasibility of implementing nuSTORM at CERN has been studied by a CERN Physics Beyond Colliders study group. The muon storage ring has been optimised for the neutrino-scattering programme to store muon beams with momenta in the range 1 GeV to 6 GeV. The implementation of nuSTORM exploits the existing fast-extraction from the SPS that delivers beam to the LHC and to HiRadMat. A summary of the proposed implementation of nuSTORM at CERN is presented below. An indicative cost estimate and a preliminary discussion of a possible time-line for the implementation of nuSTORM are presented the addendum.
