RUI: Neutrino Experiments at Fermilab

Otterbein College, Westerville OH

Investigators

Abstract

One of the major intellectual achievements of the 20th century was the development of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. This model succeeded in classifying all of the elementary particles known at the time into a hierarchy of groups having similar quantum properties. The validity of this model to date was recently confirmed by the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. However, the Standard Model as it currently exists leaves open many questions about the universe, including such fundamental questions as to why the Higgs mass has the value it has and why there is no antimatter in the universe. A primary area to search for answers to these and other open questions about the universe, how it came to be and why it is the way it is, is to focus on a study of the properties of neutrinos and to use what we know and can learn about neutrinos as probes of science beyond the Standard Model. Neutrinos are those elementary particles that interact with practically nothing else in the universe. They have no electric charge and were once thought to be massless. Like other elementary particles, they were believed to have an antimatter counterpart, the antineutrino. Moreover, the Standard Model predicted that there were actually three different kinds of neutrinos that were distinguishable through the different interactions that they did undergo whenever there was an interaction. But recent measurements have totally changed our picture of neutrinos. We now know that neutrinos do have a mass and because they do, they can actually change from one type to another. Detailed measurements of these changes, along with other current neutrino experiments, form one of the most promising ways to probe for new physics Beyond the Standard Model (BSM), and are the subject of this investigation. This research will involve the work of undergraduate students at an RUI. This award supports work, using the neutrino beam at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL), on three related neutrino experiments: MINERvA, Nova and MINOS+, all measuring neutrino oscillations: muon neutrino to electron neutrino transitions. To correctly measure these transitions, precise knowledge of neutrino interactions is required. This award will be used to measure (using the MINERvA detector) these interactions across a wide energy range available at FNAL. This will improve our knowledge of the neutrino flux, useful for future Short Baseline (detector near the source at FNAL) and Long Baseline (detector hundreds of kilometers away) experiments as well as the current Nova experiment. The work on the MINOS+ experiment will help map out the shape of the energy dependence of the neutrino oscillation probability, which could reveal new anomalies in the neutrino sector. A number of BSM proposed phenomena, from sterile neutrinos to extra dimensions, can cause measurable deviations in the neutrino oscillation probability in the 4-10GeV range. A special contribution of this award and an exciting broader impact of this research program is the development and implementation of 3D visualization tools to guide the physics analyses of the experiments and to render visible to students and the public the nature of neutrino interactions as recorded and studied by scientists.