EUROnu: proposing future neutrino facilities at CERN
Comparison of error in delta measurement in the different neutrino facilities. Image credit: EUROnu
The EUROnu project studied three different “next generation” facilities that could be located at CERN. The final results and conclusions were delivered at the end of August 2012 after 4 years of prosperous work. The studies included the accelerators, the detectors and the physics performance and cost of the complete facilities.
Two studied facilities, the Super-Beam (SB) and the Beta-Beam (BB), are designed to send neutrino beams to a future Water Cherenkov detector located in the Fréjus tunnel, 130 km from CERN. Due to the short baseline, these two facilities have good sensitivity to the CP violation process. The SB can also, with great benefit for the physics reach, deliver a beam to a longer baseline (use of the second oscillation maximum), where the CP reach is good but also some access to the mass hierarchy is possible. The third facility studied in the EUROnu project, the Neutrino Factory (NF), would use a Magnetized Iron Neutrino Detector (MIND) located at more than 2000 km from CERN. This facility would have the best physics reach, able to determine both the neutrino mass hierarchy (the spectral order of neutrinos) and to study CP violation. In addition it would have the best potential to detect evidence of “new physics”.
