Prepared for submission to JHEP DsTau: Study of tau neutrino production with 400 GeV protons from the CERN-SPS Shigeki Aoki,a Akitaka Ariga,b;1 Tomoko Ariga,b;c Sergey Dmitrievsky,d Elena Firu,e Dean Forshaw,b Tsutomu Fukuda,f Yuri Gornushkin,d Ali Murat Guler,g Maria Haiduc,e Koichi Kodama,h Masahiro Komatsu,f Muhtesem Akif Korkmaz,g Umut Kose,i Madalina Miloi,e Antonio Miucci,b Motoaki Miyanishi,f Mitsuhiro Nakamura,f Toshiyuki Nakano,f Alina Neagu,e Hiroki Rokujo,f Osamu Sato,f Elizaveta Sitnikova,d Yosuke Suzuki,f Tomoki Takao,f Svetlana Vasina,d Mykhailo Vladymyrov,b Thomas Weston,b Junya Yoshida,j Masahiro Yoshimoto.k The DsTau Collaboration aKobe University, Kobe, Japan bAlbert Einstein Center for Fundamental Physics, Laboratory for High Energy Physics, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland cKyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan dJoint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia eInstitute of Space Science, Bucharest, Romania f Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan gMiddle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey hAichi University of Education, Kariya, Japan iCERN, Geneva, Switzerland jAdvanced Science Research Center, Japan Atomic Energy Agency, Tokai, Japan kGifu University, Gifu, Japan E-mail:
[email protected] Abstract: In the DsTau experiment at the CERN SPS, an independent and direct way to measure tau neutrino production following high energy proton interactions was proposed. As the main source of tau neutrinos is a decay of Ds mesons, produced in proton-nucleus arXiv:1906.03487v1 [hep-ex] 8 Jun 2019 interactions, the project aims at measuring a differential cross section of this reaction. The experimental method is based on a use of high resolution emulsion detectors for effective registration of events with short lived particle decays.