Feasibility Experiment of a Granular Target for Future Neutrino Facilities

Granular, solid targets made of fluidized tungsten powder or static pebble bed of tungsten spheres, have been proposed and are being studied as an alternative configurations towards high-power (1MW of beam power) target systems, suitable for a future Super Beam or Neutrino Factory. With the lack of experimental data on this field, a feasibility experiment was performed in HiRadMat facility of CERN/SPS that tried on a pulse-by-pulse basis to address the effect of the impact of the SPS beam (440GeV/c) on a static tungsten granular target. Online instrumentation such as high-speed photography and laser-Doppler vibrometry was employed. Preliminary results show a powder disruption speed of less than 0.6 m/s at 3E11 protons/pulse while the disruption speed appears to be scaling proportionally with the beam intensity.