The neutrino factory: beam and experiments

Abstract

The discovery of neutrino oscillations marks a major milestone in the history of neutrino physics, and opens a new window to the still mysterious origin of masses and flavour-mixing. Many current and forthcoming experiments will answer open questions; however, a major step forward, up to and possibly including CP violation in the neutrino-mixing matrix, requires the neutrino beams from a \nf .The \nf\ is a new concept for producing neutrino beams of unprecedented quality in terms of intensity, flavour composition, and precision of the beam parameters. Most importantly,the \nf\ is the only known way to generate a high-intensity beam of electron neutrinos of high energy. The neutrino beam from a \nf , in particular the electron-neutrino beam enables the exploration of otherwise inaccessibledomains in neutrino oscillation physics by exploiting baselines ofplanetary dimensions. Suitable detectors pose formidable challenges butseem within reach with only moderate extrapolations from existingtechnologies. Although the main physics attraction of the \nf\ is in thearea of neutrino oscillations, an interesting spectrum of further opportunitiesranging from high-precision, high-rate neutrino scattering to physics withhigh-intensity stopped muons comes with it