Speaker
Description
NOvA is a long-baseline neutrino oscillations experiment designed to precisely measure the neutrino oscillation parameters. We do this by di- recting a beam of predominantly muon neutrinos from Fermilab towards northern Minnesota. The experiment consists of two functionally equiv- alent detectors each located 14.6 mrad off the central axis of Fermilab’s 700 kW NuMI neutrino beam, the world’s most intense neutrino beam. Both the Near Detector, located 1 km downstream from the beam source, and the Far Detector, located 810 km away in Ash River, MN, were con- structed from plastic extrusions filled with liquid scintillator. The three- flavour long-baseline search probes undetermined physics parameters such as the neutrino mass hierarchy (ordering), CP violation in the lepton sec- tor and the octant of θ23 (the large mixing angle). To extract these pa- rameters, we compare the neutrino interactions in the detectors to observe the disappearance of muon neutrinos and the appearance of electron neu- trinos, due to oscillations. I will present results based on the combined neutrino-mode and antineutrino-mode beam data-sets, collected by the NOvA experiment up to April 2018. I will also discuss the future physics reach of NOvA.
