EUROnu

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Welcome to the EUROnu homepage!

EUROnu is a European Commission FP7 Design Study entitled:

A High Intensity Neutrino Oscillation Facility in Europe

Further information can be found from the menus on the left and right.

EUROnu members should register to enable access to the consortium information by logging in. To do this, please send your name, institute, email address and preferred userid to the project coordinator.

What is EUROnu?

EUROnu is a Framework Programme 7 Design Study which started on 1st September 2008 and will run for 4 years. The primary aims are to study three possible future neutrino oscillation faciltiies for Europe and do a cost and performance comparison.

The four facilities being studied are:

In addition, EUROnu will look at the performance of the baseline detectors for each facility and determine the physics reach of each. Although a European project, EUROnu will collaborate closely with related international activities, in particular the International Design Study for a Neutrino Factory, IDS-NF.

Participants & Contributors

The following institutes are full members of the EUROnu consortium:

  1. Science and Technology Facilities Council, UK
  2. CEA, France
  3. CERN, Switzerland
  4. Glasgow University, UK
  5. Imperial College, London, UK
  6. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Spain
  7. Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France
  8. Politechnika Krakowska, Poland
  9. Durham University, UK
  10. Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Italy
  11. Max Planck Gesellschaft zur Foerderijng der Wissenschaften E.V., Germany
  12. Oxford University, UK
  13. Sofiiski Universitet Sveti Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria
  14. Warwick University, UK
  15. Universite Catholique de Louvain, Belgium

The following are Associate members of EUROnu:

Documents

Documents covering more than one WP.

NB All documents using EUROnu funds must contain the following acknowledgement:

We acknowledge the financial support of the European Community under the European Commission Framework Programme 7 Design Study: EUROnu, Project Number 212372. The EC is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained herein.

After submitting a document, you must contact the project coordinator for document approval. It will not appear until this has been done!

Documents for specific work packages follow. The document number should be in the form EUROnu-WPm-nnn, where m is the WP number and nnn should increment from the last document.

Work Packages

WP 1: Management and knowledge dissemination

Coordinator: Rob Edgecock
Deputy: to be appointed

Objectives

Working with the management structure described in section 2.1, this work package will coordinate the contractual, financial and administrative aspects of the Design Study and will oversee the technical and scientific work of the other work packages. It will be responsible for ensuring the project milestones are achieved and the deliverables produced on time. Further, this work package will be responsible for knowledge management for the Design Study, working with a specially created Dissemination Board. It will coordinate the protection, use and dissemination of the knowledge generated during the project. Finally, working with coordinators of the other WPs and a range of experts, it will use the information generated by the other WPs to make a relative cost and performance comparison between the facilities, for discussion by stakeholders. To do this, it will investigate, assess and select the criteria upon which the comparison will be made, in partnership with participants in the DS and international collaborators.

Tasks

WP2: Super-Beam

Coordinator: Marco Zito
Deputy: Chris Densham

Objectives

The Super-Beam work package will address the proton driver, the target and the hadron collector system. A driver with 4 MW proton beam is a key issue of future neutrino beams. In this study we will focus on the proposed 4 MW Superconducting Proton Linac (SPL) at CERN. Two conceptual design reports have already been written for the SPL and critical R&D; is being undertaken in the HIPPI JRA of the CARE FP6 I3. For these reasons, this work package will only address the issues concerning the proton energy and beam profile specific to neutrino beams. The target part is a crucial point of this study and considerable effort is required to design a viable system in the very high intensity proton beam which will induce heat shocks, power dissipation problems and radiation damage. Preliminary studies have been done in the framework of BENE Network in the FP6 CARE I3 on several proposed solutions. Near future tests, such as those which will be done by MERIT experiment, will give more input to this study. As the pions emerging from the target have a wide range of angles and momenta, it is necessary to design a magnetic collection system, focusing as many hadrons as possible into a forward direction to optimize the neutrino intensity. This system will suffer from similar problems to the target, plus thermal stress and fatigue due to the very high pulsed current sent through it in order to obtain the required magnetic field for a good focusing. An important part of this system is the high current/high frequency pulser which has to be carefully designed to assure high performance and longevity. For future high intensity neutrino beams, it is likely that the target will be inside the collector system or very close to it, inducing extra difficulties such as power dissipation. For this reason, the integration of both systems, target and collector, also has to be addressed. Finally, a simulation of the whole system (target, collector, etc) is needed to optimize the overall performance. This simulation will track the pions through the target and the collector and follow their decay to produce the neutrino beam. Characteristics of the neutrino beam (flux, spectrum, composition) will be provided as input to assess physics performance.

Tasks

WP3: Neutrino Factory

Coordinator: Juergen Pozimski
Deputy: Gersende Prior

Objectives

The International Scoping Study of a future Neutrino Factory and Super-Beam facility (the ISS) established the baseline specification for the various accelerator systems that are required to produce high-intensity, high-energy neutrino beams in the Neutrino Factory. The ISS also established that the remaining crucial issues that should be addressed through the Design Study are: the muon front-end, including the ionisation-cooling channel; the large-aperture, rapid, acceleration systems; and the target and the handling of the high-power proton beam that emerges from the pion-production target. In addition, in order to assess quantitatively the performance of the Neutrino Factory it is essential to develop an end-to-end simulation of the accelerator complex.

The Neutrino Factory work package is therefore designed to address each of these issues. Simulations of the baseline ionisation-cooling channel will be performed with a view to establishing the performance. In parallel, the potential of alternative ionisation-cooling options will be investigated to establish whether they are feasible and to determine whether they offer a performance or cost advantage. When the results of the MICE experiment are available it will be important to include these in the simulation. The baseline large-aperture, rapid acceleration system will also be studied; in addition to determining the performance of the systems involved, care will be taken to integrate the treatment of the ionisation-cooling system with the first stages of the muon acceleration. It is essential that these issues are addressed before a conceptual design report for the facility is completed. Consideration of the handling of the high-power proton beam that emerges from the target will be limited to the key issues that pertain to the Neutrino Factory: the safe handling of the beam power within the super-conducting solenoids that form the pion capture system. The end-to-end simulation developed in the course of the Design Study will be used to evaluate the performance of the facility.

Tasks

WP4: Beta-Beam

Coordinator: Elena Wildner
Deputy: Christian Hansen
HomePage: cern.ch/betanu
Data Base: Beta-Beam-Parameters

Objectives

The Beta Beam work package will address the issues of ion production and beam bunching for a Beta Beam facility. The work presently undertaken in the FP6 EURISOL DS indicates that these are the major critical issues that have to be solved to make any proposed scenario for the Beta Beam possible.

A new production concept using an internal target in a low energy production ring will be studied with special attention on the collection device for the produced radioactive ions. The study will start with a review of the EURISOL DS Beta Beam baseline for the new proposed isotopes – notably 8Li and 8B with high Q values – and the corresponding intensities that are expected with this new concept.

For beam bunching a high frequency ECR concept will be studied as a continuation of work started in EURISOL DS.

The decay ring lattice will have to be adapted to the new isotopes. The studies of the magnet protection systems for the superconducting magnets and of the collimation system started in EURISOL DS will be continued.

Tasks

WP5: Detector performance

Coordinator: Paul Soler
Deputy: Anselmo Cervera

Objectives

The aims of the detector work package will be to evaluate the baseline detector options needed to deliver the physics for each of the facilities. The top priorities for participating institutes will be to study the Magnetised Iron Neutrino Detector (MIND) for the golden channel at a Neutrino Factory, the Water Cherenkov detector for the Super-Beam and Beta Beam facilities and the performance of a near detector at each of the facilities for absolute flux normalisation, measurement of differential cross sections and detector backgrounds.

Tasks

WP6: Physics

Coordinator: Pilar Hernandez
Deputy: Andrea Donini

Objectives

The physics work package will provide the tools and expertise to quantify the physics performance of the different facilities. The design of each facility must achieve optimal physics performance and this optimization is an iterative process, in which the physics capabilities need to be re-evaluated for the baseline scenarios as they get updated with the results of the accelerator and detector work packages, as well as with the results from neutrino experiments that will be running in parallel. Particularly important will be to include the results of T2K, NOnA and/or reactor experiments as they become available, since they will pin down more precisely the parameter space and therefore the expected neutrino oscillation signals in the future facilities.

The final goal of this WP will be to perform a rigorous comparison of the different facilities in terms of physics performance, using the same methodology and assumptions.

Tasks