Speaker
Dr
Nicholas Hastings
(University of Regina)
Description
The current generation of long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments
employ an off-axis $\nu_\mu$ (or $\bar{\nu}_\mu$) beam produced by the decay of pions
created when a proton beam strikes a target. The beam is monitored at
detector facilities near the production point before travelling hundreds
of kilometres to a far detector. Aiming the beam centre slightly away
from the far detector provides the off-axis configuration which selects
a narrow energy band beam tuned to maximize the oscillation probability.
The status of these experiments will be presented.
The Tokai to Kamioka (T2K) experiment consists of a $\nu_\mu$
beam produced at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Centre (J-PARC)
in Tokai on the East coast of Japan, which is monitored by a suite of
detectors before travelling 295 km to the Super-Kamiokande
(SK) water Cerenkov detector. T2K has been in operation since 2010
and has been continually releasing new and exciting neutrino
oscillation results. The most recent precision $\nu_\mu \to \nu_e$ appearance and
$\nu_\mu$ disappearance oscillation measurements as well as initial results
running the experiment in the $\bar{\nu}_\mu$ beam configuration will be
presented.
The NO$\nu\hspace{-0.11ex}$A experiment, utilizing the NuMI beam and a near detector at
Fermilab and a far detector at a distance of 810 km, began
operation in 2014. The current status of NO$\nu\hspace{-0.11ex}$A will also be shown.
Primary author
Dr
Nicholas Hastings
(University of Regina)