8:00 AM–10:00 AM, Friday, November 10, 2006
Williamsburg Hospitality House - Empire A/B
Chair: Jeffrey Nelson, College of William & Mary
8:00 AM–8:30 AM
Jeffrey Nelson
(College of William and Mary)
After a brief review of the current neutrino oscillation status, we present results from the MINOS experiment based on its initial exposure to neutrinos from the Fermilab NuMI beam. The rates and energy spectra of charged current muon neutrino interactions are compared in two detectors located along the beam axis at distances of 1 km and 735 km. With 1.2710$^20$ 120 GeV protons incident on the NuMI target, 215 events with energies below 30 GeV are observed at the Far Detector, compared to an expectation of 336 with an error in the expectation of 14.4 events. The data are consistent with muon neutrino disappearance via two-flavor oscillations with $\Delta m^2_{23}=2.74^{+0.44}_{-0.26}\times10^{-3}$ eV$^2$ and sin$^2(2\theta_{23})> 0.87$ (68\% C.L.).