Particle production, transport, and identification in the regime of 1−7  GeV/c

The recently constructed H4-VLE beam line, a tertiary extension branch of the existing H4 beam line in the CERN North Area, was commissioned in October 2018. The beam line was designed with the purpose of providing very low energy (VLE) hadrons and positrons to the NP-04 experiment, in the momentum range of 1–7 GeV/c. The production of these low-energy particles is achieved with a mixed hadron (pions, kaons, protons), 80 GeV/c secondary beam impinging on a thick target. The H4-VLE beam line has been instrumented with prototype scintillating fiber detectors providing the beam profile, intensity, and time-of-flight measurement of the beam particles, that, together with Cherenkov threshold counters, permit an event-by-event particle identification over the entire momentum spectrum. In this paper, we present detailed results of the beam line performance and the measured beam composition, as well as the comparison of these measurements with simulations performed during the design phase using fluka and geant-4-based Monte-Carlo codes.