Intensity Frontier Instrumentation

Abstract

The fundamental origin of flavor in the Standard Model (SM) remains a mystery. Despite the roughly eighty years since Rabi asked “Who ordered that?” upon learning of the discovery of the muon, we have not understood the reason that there are three generations or, more recently, why the quark and neutrino mixing matrices and masses are so different. The solution to the flavor problem would give profound insights into physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) and tell us about the couplings and the mass scale at which the next level of insight can be found. The SM fails to explain all observed phenomena: new interactions and yet unseen particles must exist. They may manifest themselves by causing SM reactions to differ from often very precise predictions. The Intensity Frontier (1) explores these fundamental questions by searching for new physics in extremely rare processes or those forbidden in the SM. This often requires massive and/or extremely finely tuned detectors.