SBU HEP Seminar - Jeremy Wolcott (Tufts University)

Monday 4 Nov 2024, 11:45 → 12:45 America/New_York

Graduate Building D-122 (Stony Brook University)

11:45 → 12:35 Exploring neutrino oscillations in 10 years of NOvA data

Where should we look for guidance on how to reconcile the Standard Model's storied history and remarkable predictive successes with hints that it is not a complete fundamental theory? Among the many possible answers, the phenomenon of neutrino oscillations stands out: already "Beyond the Standard Model" simply by virtue of demanding that at least some neutrinos are massive, the rich phenomenology associated with oscillations also admits access to deep questions about the lepton family's structure. Are there fundamental symmetries in the way the generations relate to one another through mixing, or in how the masses are distributed? Can we at last find CP violation in the lepton sector, perhaps paving the way for a complete understanding of our universe's present matter-antimatter asymmetry?

In this talk I will discuss how the NOvA experiment at Fermilab is making precision measurements in the neutrino sector to help answer these questions. I will discuss how we search for the disappearance of muon neutrinos and appearance of electron neutrinos from a muon neutrino beam. I will demonstrate the constraints on neutrino oscillation parameters we obtain with 10 years of data, and how important synergies with measurements by other experiments enhance the indications we have. I will conclude with some thoughts about what we hope to learn from NOvA's expected full dataset.

Speaker: Jeremy Wolcott (Tufts University)

2024-11-04 Wolcott NOvA 3F osc 2024 - Stony Brook.pdf