Understand
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 $\nu(\bar \nu)$-hydrogen interactions, $\nu_\mu p \to \mu^- p \pi^+$, $\bar \nu_\mu p \to \mu^+ p \pi^-$, and $\bar \nu_\mu p \to \mu^+ n$ 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 $\nu(\bar \nu)$-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.