Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2016
Volume 61, Number 6
Saturday–Tuesday, April 16–19, 2016; Salt Lake City, Utah
Session K17: Accelerator-based Neutrino Experiments I |
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Sponsoring Units: DPF Chair: Hallsie Reno, University of Iowa Room: 251E |
Sunday, April 17, 2016 1:30PM - 1:42PM |
K17.00001: Latest Results from MINOS and MINOS+ Simon De Rijck The MINOS experiment, with a beam peak energy of 3 GeV, ran for ten years collecting beam neutrino and antineutrino data samples as well as an atmospheric neutrino data sample. The MINOS standard three-flavor oscillation analysis of the combined charged current $\nu_{\mu}$ and $\overline{\nu}_{\mu}$ beam, $\nu_{\mu}$ and $\overline{\nu}_{\mu}$ atmospheric, and $\nu_{\text{e}}$ and $\overline{\nu}_{\text{e}}$ appearance samples yielded some of the best constraints on the atmospheric neutrino oscillation parameters to date. The MINOS+ experiment started taking data in September 2013 using a neutrino beam designed for the NO$\nu$A experiment with an energy peak shifted to 7 GeV. The shift to higher neutrino energies leads to improved sensitivity to exotic phenomena including sterile neutrinos, large extra dimensions, and non-standard interactions. We will discuss the latest MINOS results and the status and plans for the MINOS+ experiment. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 17, 2016 1:42PM - 1:54PM |
K17.00002: COHERENT at the Spallation Neutron Source Bjorn Scholz, Kate Scholberg The Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, provides an intense isotropic flux of neutrinos in the few tens-of-MeV range, with a sharply-pulsed timing structure which is beneficial for background rejection. This talk will describe aspects of COHERENT, the experimental program underway to measure CEvNS (Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering) using low-energy nuclear recoil detectors. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 17, 2016 1:54PM - 2:06PM |
K17.00003: Search for Short-Baseline Oscillations in the NOvA Near Detector Siva Prasad Kasetti, Adam Aurisano, Bindu Anubha Bambah, Ting Miao, John W Cooper The anomalous electron antineutrino excess appearing in muon antineutrino beams seen by the LSND and MiniBooNE experiments can be explained by oscillations between the three known active neutrinos and new sterile neutrino flavors with masses near 1eV. If these light sterile neutrinos exist, they would open a brand new sector in physics, not foreseen in the Standard Model. NOvA is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment primarily designed to measure the rate of electron neutrino appearance at the Far Detector using the NuMI neutrino beam, which is predominantly composed of muon neutrinos at Fermilab. NOvA has two finely-grained liquid scintillator detectors placed 14 mrad off-axis to the NuMI beam. The Near Detector is located 1 km away from the NuMI target at Fermilab and the Far Detector is located 810 km away from Fermilab at Ash River, MN. Besides standard neutrino oscillation measurements, NOvA Near Detector can be used to perform searches for anomalous short-baseline oscillations and probe the LSND and MiniBooNE allowed regions for the existence of exotic phenomena such as sterile neutrinos. This talk will present sensitivities to oscillations into sterile neutrinos by searching for electron neutrino appearance and muon neutrino disappearance at the Near Detector. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 17, 2016 2:06PM - 2:18PM |
K17.00004: Sterile Neutrino Searches using the NOvA Detector Louise Suter The three-neutrino flavor paradigm has been used to model neutrino oscillations with almost universal success, but evidence arising from the LSND and MiniBooNE experiments, as well as from he reactor and gallium neutrino anomalies, suggests additional physics yet to be explained. These anomalous results can be explained by the existence of an additional sterile neutrino, with a mass of around 1 eV. So far, the evidence for this new particle has been inconclusive, as measurements that have observed a rate of neutrinos in excess of the three-flavor prediction consistent with sterile neutrino mixing are in strong tension with null results from experiments that looked for the corresponding deficit. The NOvA (NuMI Off-Axis ?e Appearance) experiment is a long-baseline off-axis neutrino oscillation with a Near Detector located 1 km for the target and a Far Detector 810 km distant. This talk will discuss the additional vital information that NOvA can bring to this picture through searches for disappearance of active neutrinos from the NuMI (Neutrinos from the Main Injector) beam and present preliminary results and sensitivities. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 17, 2016 2:18PM - 2:30PM |
K17.00005: Electron neutrino appearance analysis in the NOvA experiment Erika Catano Mur The NuMI Off-Axis electron-neutrino Appearance (NOvA) experiment is a second generation, long-baseline, neutrino oscillation experiment. It consists of two finely segmented, liquid scintillator detectors separated by 810 km and operating 14 mrad off-axis from the NuMI muon neutrino beam. The NOvA experiment is poised to make critical measurements of several neutrino oscillation parameters over the next decade. This talk will describe the electron neutrino appearance analysis and present results using the first year of data collected. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 17, 2016 2:30PM - 2:42PM |
K17.00006: Energy Estimation for the NOvA Electron Neutrino Appearance Analysis Fernanda Psihas The NOvA experiment measures long baseline $\nu_{\mu} \rightarrow \nu_{e}$ oscillations in Fermilab's NuMI beam. Measurement of this oscillation probability enables determination of the neutrino mass ordering and opens a window to observation of charge-parity violation in the neutrino sector. NOvA started taking data in 2014 and has already observed $\nu_{e}$ appearance at the 3.3 $\sigma$ level with the first 7$\%$ of the total projected dataset last year. Future analyses will exploit the expected energy dependence of oscillation to improve sensitivity. A new method to estimate energy for $\nu_{e}$ events and its impact on the next analysis will be discussed. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 17, 2016 2:42PM - 2:54PM |
K17.00007: Rejecting Non-MIP-Like Tracks using Boosted Decision Trees with the T2K Pi-Zero Subdetector Matthew Hogan, Jacklyn Schwehr, Daniel Cherdack, Robert Wilson Tokai-to-Kamioka (T2K) is a long-baseline neutrino experiment with a narrow band energy spectrum peaked at 600 MeV. The Pi-Zero detector (P\O D) is a plastic scintillator-based detector located in the off-axis near detector complex 280 meters from the beam origin. It is designed to constrain neutral-current induced $\pi^{0}$ production background at the far detector using the water target which is interleaved between scintillator layers. A {P\O D}-based measurement of charged-current (CC) single charged pion (1$\pi^{+}$) production on water is being developed which will have expanded phase space coverage as compared to the previous analysis. The signal channel for this analysis, which for T2K is dominated by $\Delta$ production, is defined as events that produce a single muon, single charged pion, and any number of nucleons in the final state. The analysis will employ machine learning algorithms to enhance CC1$\pi^{+}$ selection by studying topological observables that characterize signal well. Important observables for this analysis are those that discriminate a minimum ionizing particle (MIP) like a muon or pion from a proton at the T2K energies. This work describes the development of a discriminator using Boosted Decision Trees to reject non-MIP-like P\O D tracks. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 17, 2016 2:54PM - 3:06PM |
K17.00008: The Design and Monitoring of the Timing and Synchronization System at the NOvA Experiment Justin Vasel NOvA is an accelerator-based, long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment designed to probe the mass hierarchy and mixing structure of the neutrino sector. The experiment consists of a near detector at Fermilab and a far detector 810 km away in northern Minnesota positioned to receive neutrinos from Fermilab's NuMI beam. A GPS-based timing system has been designed and built to synchronize the 344,064 far detector readout elements and 20,192 near detector readout elements to an absolute timing precision that provides a channel-to-channel variation of less than 10 ns. This is done while simultaneously synchronizing the readout timing of the near and far detectors to the Fermilab accelerator complex to allow for the detection of the individual neutrino beam spills in each of the detectors. This presentation will outline the design of NOvA's timing system and discuss the means by which we monitor its performance to ensure the quality of the physics data being collected. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 17, 2016 3:06PM - 3:18PM |
K17.00009: Role of hierarchy, of $\delta\mapsto\pi-\delta$ symmetry, and of the octant of $\theta_{23}$ in the analysis of neutrino oscillation data Bernadette Cogswell, David Latimer, David Ernst The role that symmetries play in the phenomenological determination of the six three-neutrino mixing parameters is investigated. From formulae for the oscillation probabilities, we derive the symmetries for two special cases, the CP conserved case ($\delta=0$ and $\pi$) and maximal CP violation case ($\delta=\pm\pi/2$). For these two cases, we show that for both cases there are only two independent solutions in vacuum, and due to the interaction with matter, four independent solutions in general. Guided by a broken symmetry, we perform a global analysis for the CP conserved case. We compare in detail our results to three recent global analyses that include CP violation. The comparison is to their results with the CP phase marginalized away. We find that the results for $\theta_{13}$ and $\Delta m^2_{23}$, which result from the leading order terms of the oscillation formulae, are consistent across the analyses, that negative $\delta$ is preferred at a not totally insignificant level, and that there is some indication that the second octant is preferred for $\theta_{23}$. [Preview Abstract] |
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