Speaker
Description
Observations of neutrino oscillations from the majority of neutrino
oscillation experiments are consistent with a three-flavor framework.
However, the excess of events seen by LSND and MiniBooNE may be
incompatible with this model and, to explain these data using neutrino
mixing, require an additional, sterile, neutrino. These intriguing results
are not conclusive and are in tension with findings from other short-
baseline and long-baseline experiments.
The NOvA experiment, which uses two functionally identical liquid
scintillator detectors over an 810 km baseline in the Fermilab NuMI beam,
has the potential to set world-leading limits on the θ24 and θ34 parameters
governing sterile neutrino oscillations by searching for a deficit of neutral
current interactions compared to that predicted at the two detectors. The
results of this analysis when applied to the full NOvA 12.3e20 POT
antineutrino dataset will be presented. Limits on the sterile neutrino
mixing parameters, the first from a long-baseline analysis with
antineutrinos, will be shown, and plans for future analyses, including a
two-detector joint fit utilizing a covariance matrix to constrain systematics,
will be discussed.
