| Summary: | The neutrino factory is a facility for future precision studies of neutrino oscillations. A so-called near detector is essential for reaching the required precision for a neutrino oscillation analysis. The main task of the near detector is to measure the flux of the neutrino beam. Such a high intensity neutrino source like a neutrino factory provides also the opportunity for precision studies of various neutrino interaction processes in the near detector. We discuss the design concepts of such a detector. Results of simulations of a high resolution scintillating fiber tracker show that such a detector is capable of determining the neutrino flux normalization with an uncertainty of less than 1% by measuring pure leptonic interactions. Reconstruction of the neutrino energy in each event and a flux estimation based on the shapes of the neutrino energy spectra are discussed. A full setup of the near detector, consisting of a high granularity vertex detector, high resolution tracker, and muon catcher is also presented. Finally, a method to extrapolate the measured near detector flux to the far detector is shown, demonstrating that it is able to extract the correct values of θ_{13} and the CP violation phase δ without any significant bias and with high accuracy.
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