Commissioning results of the tertiary beam lines for the CERN neutrino platform project

For many decades the CERN North Area facility at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) has delivered secondary beams to various fixed target experiments and test beams. In 2018, two new tertiary extensions of the existing beam lines, designated “H2-VLE” and “H4-VLE”, have been constructed and successfully commissioned. These beam lines have been designed to provide charged particles of both polarities in the momentum range from 0.3 GeV/c to 12 GeV/c. During the design phase, multiple simulation tools and techniques have been employed to optimize the tertiary beam line layout in terms of particle production, transverse beam dynamics and particle identification on an event-by-event basis. In this paper, a comparison of the simulated performance and the first measurement results obtained during the commissioning phase are presented.