Neutrino cross-section measurement with neutrinos from muon decay

In this paper, we stress the idea that new, more precise neutrino cross-sections measurements at low energies will be necessary to improve the results of future big neutrino detectors, which will be dominated by the contribution of the systematic errors. The use of a muon beam instead of the traditional pion beams is proposed. This choice allows the simultaneous measurement of both, v. and v, interactions and the two helicities, in a clean environment and with a precise knowledge of the beam flux. We show that with similar to10(15) mu's/year and a moderate mass detector (similar to100 tons) placed close to the muon storage ring, precisions of the order of 10% in sigma(v)/E-v (E-v bin size of 100 MeV) can be reached for neutrino energies below 2 GeV. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.