Neutrino beam monitoring with the SAND detector at the DUNE near site

The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a next-generation long-baseline neutrino experiment, consisting of a new high-intensity beam facility, a Near Detector at Fermilab, and a Far Detector with four liquid Argon time-projection chambers located at ∼1300 km distance. The Near Detector will include three distinct detectors, one of which, SAND (System for on-Axis Neutrino Detection), will play a crucial role in constraining systematic uncertainties to validate the measurements obtained at the Far Detector. For this purpose, beam monitoring is critical for detecting any potential variations of the beam caused by issues in accelerator operations. This study investigates the feasibility of beam monitoring by analyzing the muon momentum distributions obtained from the simulations of neutrino interactions in the SAND upstream calorimeter. A set of 93 different neutrino beam anomalies were considered, and the SAND beam monitoring capabilities were analyzed using two-sample hypothesis testing.