To help to shed light on the nature of elusive neutrino particles, CERN’s Neutrino Platform enables a global community of neutrino experts to develop and prototype different projects for next-generation neutrino experiments. From DUNE at LBNF in the United States to T2K in Japan, developments for far and near detectors are advancing well. Alongside this, novel identification techniques for neutrino beams are vital to strongly reduce systematic uncertainties on key observables – such as the flavour-dependent neutrino flux. These techniques are being developed in the framework of the Physics Beyond Colliders study, in particular by the ENUBET and NuTAG collaborations.

ENUBET aims to exploit the fact that every time a neutrino is produced, it is accompanied by a charged lepton that can be detected and identified in a calorimeter with very good resolution. To detect these charged leptons, physicists envision a fully instrumented 40-metre-long decay tunnel. The collaboration has just completed a first successful test of its demonstrator’s full data acquisition system.

NuTAG proposes to follow the concept of a tagged neutrino beam to study neutrino oscillations using silicon detector technology. A proof-of-principle of this technique has been recently demonstrated at the NA62 experiment at CERN, where two tagged neutrino candidates have been found for the first time.

Combining these two concepts would result in a tagged neutrino beam with full particle identification. At the moment, a feasibility study is under way to find a suitable site for a possible first implementation.

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This is a short summary of this article published in the newsletter of CERN’s EP department.