Electron neutrino tagging through tertiary lepton detection

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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 contamination originating from Kₑ3 decays by about one order of magnitude. Only a limited suppression (60%) is achieved for produced by the decay-in-flight of muons; for low beam powers, similar performance as for Kₑ3 can be reached supplementing the tagging system with an instrumented beam dump.