FIZIKA B 4 (1995) 3, 287-295

A NEW ANALYSIS OF THE n_t ® t^- ® e^- CHANNEL IN NOMAD

MARIO STIPČEVIĆ and ANTE LJUBIČIĆ
Ruđer Bošković Institute, POB 1016, HR-10 001 Zagreb, Croatia

Dedicated to Professor Mladen Paić on the occasion of his 90^th birthday

Received 1 September 1995

The NOMAD experiment at CERN is gathering its first data in the quest for neutrino oscillations, using the n_m wide band neutrino beam. The experiment is the most sensitive to oscillations n_m ® n_t, but n_m® n_e can be also studied as well as some additional physics. Here, the results of a novel study of the so-called ``electronic channel'', i.e. n_t + N ® t^- + X, followed by t^- ® e^- n_t [`(n_e)], is presented. The study is done with a help of a program based on the LEPTO event generator and simple detector simulation. It is shown that a conceivable deterioration of spatial resolution of the drift chambers with respect to what has been originally proposed, would not deteriorate significantly the signal-to-noise ratio in this channel. On the other hand, the quality of the f_eh-f_mh cut is shown to be extremely sensitive to the knowledge of the exact angle of incident neutrinos with respect to the horizontal axis of the detector. Finally, a new cut, involving the hadronic calorimeter installed at the back field return yoke of the NOMAD magnet, is proposed and shown to reduce the background by a factor of about two.

UDC 539.12
PACS 14.60.Pq

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