A measurement of neutrino oscillations with muon neutrinos in the MINOS experiment

• Main Author: Coleman, Stephen James
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: W&M ScholarWorks 2011
• Subjects: Physics
• Online Access: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539623581; https://scholarworks.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3372&context=etd

Experimental evidence has established that neutrino flavor states evolve over time. A neutrino of a particular flavor that travels some distance can be detected in a different neutrino flavor state. The Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) is a long-baseline experiment that is designed to study this phenomenon, called neutrino oscillations. MI-NOS is based at Fermilab near Chicago, IL, and consists of two detectors: the Near Detector located at Fermilab, and the Far Detector, which is located in an old iron mine in Soudan, MN. Both detectors are exposed to a beam of muon neutrinos from the NuMI beamline, and MINOS measures the fraction of muon neutrinos that disappear after traveling the 734 km between the two detectors. One can measure the atmospheric neutrino mass splitting and mixing angle by observing the energy-dependence of this muon neutrino disappearance. MINOS has made several prior measurements of these parameters.;Here I describe recently-developed techniques used to enhance our sensitivity to the oscillation parameters, and I present the results obtained when they are applied to a dataset that is twice as large as has been previously analyzed. We measure the mass splitting Dm223=&parl0;2.32+0.12 -0.08&parr0; x 10-3 eV²/c4 and the mixing angle sin²(2theta32) > 0.90 at 90% C.L. These results comprise the world's best measurement of the atmospheric neutrino mass splitting. Alternative disappearance models are also tested. The neutrino decay hypothesis is disfavored at 7.2sigma and the neutrino quantum decoherence hypothesis is disfavored at 9.0sigma.