Electron neutrino tagging through tertiary lepton detection

We discuss an experimental technique aimed at tagging electron neutrinos in multi-GeV artificial sources on an event-by-event basis. It exploits in a novel manner calorimetric and tracking technologies developed in the framework of the LHC experiments and of rare kaon decay searches. The setup is suited for slow-extraction, moderate power beams and it is based on an instrumented decay tunnel equipped with tagging units that intercept secondary and tertiary leptons from the bulk of undecayed π ⁺ and protons. We show that the taggers are able to reduce the ν _e contamination originating from K _e3 decays by about one order of magnitude. Only a limited suppression (～60%) is achieved for ν _e produced by the decay-in-flight of muons; for low beam powers, similar performance as for K _e3 can be reached supplementing the tagging system with an instrumented beam dump.