Session K8: Neutrino Physics I

The Status and Prospects of MINOS/NuMI

The MINOS experiment is designed to measure properties of neutrino oscillations. A neutrino beam generated by the NuMI facility at Fermilab is directed towards the Soudan mine, located 735km away in Minnesota. A comparison of the observed neutrino events at the Near Detector at Fermilab and at the Far Detector in the mine gives a precise measurement of the oscillation parameters. The NuMI primary beam line is designed to transport up to $4 \times 10^{13}$ protons to the MINOS target every 2 seconds to generate a neutrino beam for the experiment. The final alignment and tuning of the NuMI beam line is being completed and the beam line is expected to be fully commissioned by early spring of this year. Both of the MINOS detectors have been installed and are ready for taking data with the neutrino beam. The Far Detector is already accumulating significant amounts of atmospheric neutrino data. This talk will present the status of MINOS and NuMI, and the anticipated first signals from neutrino beam data.   

Atmospheric Neutrino Detection in the MINOS Far Detector

The MINOS Far Detector is a 5.4 kt magnetized calorimeter located at the Soudan underground labratory at Soudan, Minnesota. Besides its use in the long baseline experiment, the Far Detector can observe atmospheric neutrinos that interact in the detector or in the rock below it. The magnetic field allows for separation of $\nu_{\mu}$ versus $\bar\nu_{\mu}$ samples for charged-current interactions that produce muons. This direct determination of charge allows for testing of CPT symmetry in the neutrino sector using these samples. Preliminary results and prospects are presented.   

Status of the MINOS Near Detector

MINOS is a long-baseline two-detector neutrino oscillation experiment. Neutrinos produced by the NuMI beamline at Fermilab are observed at the Near and the Far Detectors placed 735km apart. The Far Detector has been fully operational since summer 2003 and has been taking atmospheric muon and neutrino data since early on in its construction. The installation of the Near Detector was completed in December 2004 and the detector is now fully operational. A significant amount of cosmic ray data has been collected in the Near Detector and used for the initial commissioning and preliminary calibration. Details of the Near Detector construction and installation will be presented and the first NuMI neutrino events in the Near Detector will be shown.   

Overview of the MINERvA Experiment

The MINERvA experiment to run at Fermilab will use a fully active scintillator based fine-grained neutrino detector to exploit the high rate NuMI beam. Minerva will measure low energy neutrino interaction properties and cross sections to a new level of precision. These measurements will be important for the extraction of neutrino properties from accelerator based neutrino oscillations experiments, performed at the few GeV energy regime. This talk will present an overview of the beam-line, detector, and physics potential of MINERvA. In addition a status report of the project will also be discussed.   

The Reaction $\bar\nu_L + p\longrightarrow L^+ +\Lambda$

We obtain total and differential cross sections for the reaction $\bar\nu_L + p\longrightarrow L^+ + \Lambda$ where $L$ is an electron,muon, or tau lepton. We do this for values of the incoming neutrino energy from near threshold to several GeV. We obtain the contributions of the various form factors to these cross sections and discuss the prospects for isolating individual contributions. We compare our results to results for the inverse reaction, $L^- + p\longrightarrow \nu_L + \Lambda$ and discuss what might be learned from both types of reactions. We also discuss the possibility of observing this neutrino reaction by the MINER$\nu$A collaboration. We make our method of calculation as phenomenological as possible and make use of SU(3) relations and $\Lambda$ beta decay data to obtain the form factors where possible.   

MIPP Experiment at Fermilab and Particle Fragmentation Scaling Law

The Main Injector Particle Production experiment (MIPP- FNAL E-907) at Fermilab uses a large acceptance spectrometer to measure particle production on hydrogen and nuclei using tagged secondary p, K, and $\pi$ beams of both charges and momenta from 5 to 80 GeV/c and a primary proton beam of 120 GeV/c. MIPP's physics run has just started and will last till the summer of 2005. The experiment has charged particle identification for the whole of final state phase space using a combination of dE/dx, ToF, Cherenkov and RICH technologies. We explore the dynamics of minimum bias interactions and test a scaling law of fragmentation with unprecedented precision and statistics. Other physics of the MIPP experiment (meson spectroscopy, Nuclear Physics, service measurements for neutrino experiments) will be described briefly. Possibilities to upgrade MIPP by speeding up its electronics will be mentioned.   

Applications of the MIPP Experiment to Neutrino Beam Calculations

The Main Injector Particle Production experiment (FNAL E907) measures particle production on nuclear targets using a tagged secondary beam of $p$, $\bar{p}$, $K^\pm$, and $\pi^\pm$ ranging in momenta from 5 to 80 GeV/$c$, and a primary proton beam of 120 GeV/$c$. The experiment uses a large acceptance spectrometer for tracking and a combination of $dE/dx$, time of flight, threshold and ring-imaging Cherenkov techniques for particle identification over the full range of final state parameters. The experiment is just getting underway and will run through the summer of 2005. This talk will discuss the application of the MIPP measurements to neutrino experiments such as K2K, MINOS, miniBooNE, T2K, and NOvA which use proton-nucleus interactions to produce high intensity neutrino beams.   

Ultra High Energy Neutrino-Nucleon Scattering

We study the scattering of ultra high energy neutrinos ($10^{16}-10^{22} eV$) on nucleons. The cross section is dominated by small $x$ gluons in the nucleon. We use the color glass condensate formulation of small $x$ QCD to calculate the neutrino-nucleon cross section and compare the results with those from the various DGLAP based parameterizations of the gluon distribution function. We finally examine the contribution of very small $x (\leq 10^{-7})$ gluons to the cross section.