A novel technique for the measurement of the electron neutrino cross section

Abstract

Absolute neutrino cross section measurements are presently limited by uncertainties on $\nu$ fluxes. In this paper, we propose a technique that is based on the reconstruction of large angle positrons in the decay tunnel to identify three-body semileptonic $K^{+}\to e^{+}{\pi }^0{\nu }_e$ decays. This tagging facility operated in positron counting mode ("event count mode") can be employed to determine the absolute ${\nu }_e$ flux at the neutrino detector with $\mathcal{O}(1\%)$ precision. Facilities operated in "event by event tag mode" i.e. tagged neutrino beams that exploit the time coincidence of the positron at source and the ${\nu }_e$ interaction at the detector, are also discussed.

Comments: 23 pages, 7 figures. Version to appear in EPJC