Operating a High-Power Neutrino Beam Facility at Fermilab

The most powerful neutrino beam in the world has been developed by Fermilab and is being used to look for physics beyond the Standard Model. The current facility producing a wideband spectrum neutrino beam is NuMI, which produces neutrinos by using a 700 kW Main Injector (MI) proton beam. The MI proton beam has a momentum of 120 GeV/c and smashes into a 1.2-meter-long graphite target to create charged pions. Those pions are focused by magnetic horns and decayed into muons and muon neutrinos in a 700-meter-long decay pipe, allowing enough time for pions of various momenta to decay and produce the wanted neutrinos. Neutrinos and residual charged particles traverse several beam detectors downstream of the decay pipe to check their qualities for neutrino experiments and only neutrinos reach to the far detector that is located 810 km away from Fermilab. We have overcome several technical issues to handle the power of such a beam. Fermilab now plans for 1 MW beam operation by using a radiation robust beam element. We will discuss how we overcame challenges of robust beam elements in the past and how we are preparing for even higher power neutrino beam facility in the future.