NuFact 2022 is the twentythird in the series of yearly international workshops which started in 1999. The main goal of the workshop is to review the progress of current and future facilities able to improve on measurements of the properties of neutral and charged lepton flavor violation, as well as searches for new phenomena beyond the capabilities of presently planned experiments.
The main goal of the workshop is to review the progress of current and future facilities able to improve on measurements of the properties of neutral and charged lepton flavor violation, as well as searches for new phenomena beyond the capabilities of presently planned experiments. The workshop is both interdisciplinary and interregional in that experimenters, theorists, and accelerator physicists from all over the world share expertise with the common goal of reviewing the results of currently operating experiments and designing the next generation of experiments. To allow for worldwide participation we plan to broadcast plenary sessions and make selected parallel sessions available. Plenary sessions will be mostly held in the mornings in Utah, which translates into convenient times for international participants from the Americans and Europe/Africa regions. NuFact will include some dedicated hybrid events with opportunities for remote participants to give presentations and to discuss with the in-person participants.
Before and during the conference we will also have several mini-workshops and panel discussions. We will have the following events: (1) Multi-messenger Tomography of Earth Workshop (MMTE 2022)[July 30-31, 2022], (2) ESSnuSB+ Workshop, (3) Early career scientist career development workshop, and a panel discussion on the Snowmass exercise.
We are planning a fully in-person event. Plenary and selected parallel sessions will be streamed for world-wide participation. NuFact will include some dedicated virtual events with opportunities for remote participants to give presentations.
The NuFact 2022 workshop program consists of plenary sessions, parallel sessions with seven Working Groups covering the following topics:
Welcome to the MMTE workshop and event logistics
The aim of this talk is to set the stage for the neutrino tomography workshop and to provide basic information about the properties of atmospheric neutrinos. I will present a pedagogical overview on atmospheric neutrinos, their history, and briefly review their current use in the study of neutrino oscillation.
For a century the earth's interior (core (liquid)-mantle-crust) has been recognized and since we have identified a solid inner core and now many new structures that are “anchored” on the core-mantle-boundary (CMB). Moreover, we have successfully imaged subducting oceanic plates penetrating the upper mantle and many entering the lower mantle (>660 km). Over the last two decades, geoneutrino flux measurements are quantifying earth's radiogenic power, giving us the first global determination of bulk composition. More recently the detection of atmospheric and cosmological neutrinos that have traversed the earth are offering a new opportunity to measure other attributes of the earth's interior, mainly its density structure and hydrogen content. The age, origin, nature, and dynamic evolution of these structures will be discussed.
Earthquakes, ocean waves, and human activity produce seismic waves that travel through the Earth, carrying with them information about variations in elastic properties and density. Since pioneering efforts in the late 1970s, global seismic tomography has revealed structures in our planet's deep interior at increasingly greater detail. Here, I present recent progress in determining Earth's elastic and density structure, and discuss key structures at various scales. Finally, I review challenges and limitations facing seismologists in their efforts to obtain more precise images of the interior.
The world largest neutrino observatory IceCube, located at the South Pole, is collecting high-energy neutrino events for over 10 years, and has observed a diffuse cosmic neutrino flux since 2013. While the main aim is searching for extra-terrestrial neutrinos, the collected data contains a large sample of atmospheric neutrino interactions as background events. Using our understanding of the atmospheric neutrino flux and detector systematics of IceCube, these events can be utilised to probe for the density structure of the Earth’s interior. In this talk we discuss the analysis method and expected performance using the IceCube muon neutrino sample collected from 2010 to 2020.
Hydrogen is a strongly siderophile (iron-loving) element under typical conditions of Earth’s core formation (40–50 GPa, ~3500 K); its metal/silicate partition coefficient D(H) (metal/silicate) = ~50 by weight (Tagawa et al., 2021 Nat. Commun.). Considering the amount of H2O in the mantle and oceans, such high D(H) (metal/silicate) suggests 0.3–0.6 wt% H in the core, which accounts for 30–60 % of the outer core density deficit and velocity excess compared to pure iron. The 0.3–0.6 wt% H in the outer core is compatible with seismological observations of its density and velocity; indeed, ab initio calculations showed these observations are explained with 1.0 wt% H as a single light element (Umemoto and Hirose, 2020 EPSL). The solid-Fe/liquid-alloy partition coefficient of hydrogen D(H) (solid-Fe/liquid) was recently determined to be 0.7 by weight in the Fe-Si-H system at 50 GPa (Hikosaka et al., 2022 SciRep). If it can be applied to inner core conditions (>330 GPa), the solid core may include 0.2–0.4 wt% H. It agrees with recent theoretical calculations of a possible range of the inner core composition that explains the observed density, compressional and shear velocities (Wang et al., 2021 EPSL). Note that the presence of carbon and/or hydrogen is important to explain the low shear/compressional velocity ratio characteristic of the inner core (He et al., 2022 Nature). In addition, Fe-FeH has recently been found to be an eutectic system (Tagawa et al., 2022 JGR), and the melting (liquidus) temperature of Fe-H alloys is low, in particular when 0.3–0.6 wt% H is included. It suggests low core temperatures, consistent with the fact that the base of the mantle is not globally molten. The 0.3–0.6 wt% H in the core is thus favored, but the present estimate depends largely on the mantle water abundance and the Earth’s accretion process. Neutrino observations will be very helpful if they provide additional constraints on hydrogen concentration in the deep interior.
I would give a brief review on the topic concerning the core-mantle co-evolution in terms of thermal and chemical evolution of Earth’s core constrained from the mantle dynamics of Earth. In this talk, several controversial aspects in current understandings of thermal and chemical evolution of the Earth’s core will be introduced: 1. The age of inner core (greatly uncertain in between ~1 Ga to 3 Ga) and potential energy source for geodynamo operating over 4 billion years, 2. Emergence of stably stratified region at the uppermost outer core and its origin (thermal or chemical) and 3. possibility on the radiogenic heat source in Earth’s core.
We study in details the Earth matter effects on the boron neutrinos
from the Sun using recently developed 3D models of the Earth.
The models have a number of new features of the density profiles,
in particular, a substantial deviation from spherical symmetry.
In this connection, we further elaborate on relevant aspects
of oscillations ($\epsilon^2$ corrections, adiabaticity violation, entanglement, {\it etc.})
and the attenuation effect.
The night excesses of the $\nu e-$ and $\nu N-$ events and
the Day-Night asymmetries, $A_{ND}$, are presented in terms of the
matter potential and the generalized energy resolution functions.
The energy dependences of the cross-section and the flux improve the resolution,
and consequently, sensitivity to remote structures of the profiles.
The nadir angle ($\eta$) dependences of $A_{ND}$ are computed for future detectors DUNE,
THEIA, Hyper-Kamiokande, and MICA
at the South pole.
Perspectives of the oscillation tomography of the Earth
with the boron neutrinos are discussed. Next-generation detectors
will establish the integrated day-night asymmetry with high confidence level.
They can give some indications of the $\eta-$
dependence of the effect, but will discriminate among different models
at most at the $(1 - 2)\sigma$ level.
For high-level discrimination, the MICA-scale experiments are needed. MICA can
detect the ice-soil borders and perform unique tomography of Antarctica.
In the last decade IceCube has opened a new window on the Universe using neutrinos as astronomical messengers. The instrument detects more than 100,000 neutrinos per year in the GeV to 10,000 TeV energy range. IceCube and similar detectors now under construction or at the concept stage, will perform neutrino physics with high statistics samples of atmospheric neutrinos and with the beam of high-energy neutrinos of cosmic origin that can be separated from atmospheric neutrinos at TeV energies and above. We will discuss the surprising observation that extragalactic cosmic ray accelerators dominate nearby Galactic sources with an energy flux that is comparable to that of high-energy photons. We will discuss the emergence of their sources after a decade of IceCube observations and in multimessenger campaigns. Importantly for this meeting, cosmic neutrinos provide us with a PeV-energy beam for neutrino physics.
The Earth's core may be divided into two main regions: a solid inner core; and a liquid outer core. At the base of the outer core is a seismologically anomalous layer, likely denser than the liquid above. There may also be a low-density layer at the top of the outer core. The solid inner core is divided into two regions: a seismically anisotropic inner zone, and an isotropic layer on top. Although mainly composed of Fe, the core also contains ~5% Ni and one or more light elements. Light element candidates include C,S,Si,O and H. Of these, O is almost certainly present; S or Si are plausible; and C and H are considered less likely. The core may also contain small amounts of noble gases. Radioactive K in the core could affect its cooling history, but current estimates suggest a core K concentration of ~30ppm - too small to have a significant effect.
Using PREM as a reference model for the
Earth density distribution we present results on
the sensitivity of ORCA detector to deviations of the Earth
i) outer core (OC) density, ii) inner core (IC) density,
iii) total core density, and iv) mantle density,
from their respective PREM densities.
The results are obtained in EPJ C82 (2022) 461
by studying the effects of the Earth matter
on the oscillations of atmospheric $\nu_{\mu}$, $\nu_e$, $\bar{\nu}_\mu$
and $\bar{\nu}_e$. We show that the ORCA sensitivity
to the OC, IC, core and mantle densities
depends strongly on the type of systematic uncertainties
used in the analysis, on the value of the atmospheric neutrino mixing
angle $\theta_{23}$, on whether the Earth mass constraint is implemented
or not, and on the way it is implemented,
and on the type - with normal ordering (NO) or
inverted ordering (IO) - of the light neutrino mass spectrum.
We show, in particular, that in the most favorable'' NO case of
implemented Earth mass constraint,minimal'' systematic errors and $\sin^2\theta_{23}=0.58$,
ORCA can determine, e.g., the OC (mantle)
density at $3\sigma$ C.L. after 10 years of operation
with an uncertainty of (-18\%)/+15\% (of (-6\%)/+8\%). In the most disfavourable'' NO
case ofconservative'' systematic errors
and, e.g., $sin^2\theta_{23} = 0.50$ and 0.58 the uncertainties read, respectively:
(-37)\%/+30\% and (-30\%)/+24\% ((-13\%)/+16\% and (-11\%/+14\%)).
We find also that the sensitivity
of ORCA to the OC, core and mantle densities
is significantly worse for IO neutrino mass spectrum.
Seismic imaging of the structure of Earth’s inner core remains a challenging topic. The inner core occupies < 1% of Earth’s volume and the few seismic waves that do sample it can be significantly influenced by heterogeneities in the overlying crust and mantle. Furthermore, the seismic sources and receivers used in imaging the inner core are located at or near (< 700 km depth) Earth’s surface and are irregularly distributed—most seismometers are deployed on land and most earthquakes occur near tectonic plate boundaries. Here I review the current standard model of inner core structure and describe some of the outstanding questions such as topography on the inner core boundary, hemisphericity, the innermost inner core, and shear velocity in the inner core.
The core-mantle boundary (CMB) region is both a compositional and thermal boundary layer with the largest density contrast anywhere in the planet. As a result, the structures found within the lowermost mantle are as complex as those found on the Earth’s surface. In this presentation we review the major features that have been identified from seismological studies. We review features at (1) the largest (> 1000 km) scales as revealed through seismic tomography of body wave and normal modes (2) intermediate scales (~10’s to 1000 km) as revealed through waveform modeling, and (3) at the smallest scales (~10s of km) as revealed through stochastic studies. At the largest scales two Large Low Velocity Provinces (LLVPs) beneath Africa and the Pacific Ocean dominate the tomographic images. These two features are surrounded by high seismic wave velocity regions that are consistent with remains of the past ~200 million years of subduction. At the largest scales, D” discontinuity structure is consistently observed in the high velocity regions, but has also been observed within the LLVP’s at an apparently shallower depth. We discuss the nature of the LLVP’s, their possible origins, and the ongoing debate surrounding what they physically represent. At the intermediate scales, multiple features have been observed, including core rigidity zones (CRZs), ultra-high velocity zones (UHVZs), and ultra-low velocity zones (ULVZs). Of these features, the ULVZs have received the most attention and appear to occupy a significant portion of the CMB landscape, with as much as 20% of the CMB region containing ULVZs inferred. Here we review current ideas about what these features are, where they are located, and their importance for whole Earth dynamic processes. At the smallest scales, the CMB area contains regions that generate the largest amplitude scattered arrivals. We discuss the locations where this scattered energy originates and the potential origins of the scatterers.
In Earth’s deepest mantle, there are two huge structures with anomalously lower seismic velocities, and perhaps different compositions, than their surroundings. One such structure is found beneath Africa and the other is beneath the Pacific Ocean. They are often called “Large Low Velocity Provinces”. These structures are footprints of Earth’s long-term evolution. By examining their morphology and physical-chemical properties, we can greatly improve our understanding of how the planet evolved in the past 4.5 billion years. Through an exhaustive analysis of previous seismic images of Earth’s mantle, we discovered that the African anomaly is about 1,000 km taller than the Pacific anomaly. By performing mantle convection simulations with high-performance computers, we find that the most significant control on the maximum height that a compositionally distinct structure can reach is its density. These results further suggests that the Africa anomaly is unstable because it is not dense enough, in which case it may have been rising up in recent geological time.
The neutrino oscillation probability depends on the electron density of the media and next generation neutrino detector will have the capability to resolve the earth's electron density distribution with some accuracy.
If we combine the earth's matter density distribution and electron density distribution, then we can obtain the average chemical compositional distribution as Z/A ratio. Also if we assume some chemical composition model of the Earth, then we can obtain the matter density distribution of the Earth complimentaly. We will discuss about the possibility to measure the compositional distribution of the Earth using next generation large water cherenkov detector.
The Iron Calorimeter (ICAL) detector at the proposed India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) aims to detect atmospheric neutrinos and antineutrinos separately in the multi-GeV range of energies and over a wide range of baselines. By utilizing its charge identification capability, ICAL can efficiently distinguish $\mu^-$ and $\mu^+$ events. Atmospheric neutrinos passing long distances through Earth can be detected at ICAL with good resolution in energy and direction, which enables ICAL to see the density-dependent matter oscillations experienced by upward-going neutrinos in the multi-GeV range of energies. In this work, we explore the possibility of utilizing neutrino oscillations in the presence of matter to extract information about the internal structure of Earth complementary to seismic studies. Using good directional resolution, ICAL would be able to observe 331 $\mu^-$ and 146 $\mu^+$ core-passing events with 500 kt$\cdot$yr exposure. With this exposure, we show for the first time that the presence of Earth's core can be independently confirmed at ICAL with a median $\Delta \chi^2$ of 7.45 (4.83) assuming normal (inverted) mass ordering by ruling out the simple two-layered mantle-crust profile in theory while generating the prospective data with the PREM profile. We observe that in the absence of charge identification capability of ICAL, this sensitivity deteriorates significantly to 3.76 (1.59) for normal (inverted) mass ordering.
Earth's core plays a fundamental role in the evolution and habitability of our planet. Understanding its composition is key to interpreting the history of Earth's accretion. The density model suggests that the Earth's core is predominantly composed of iron (or iron-nickel alloy) with several percent of light elements, such as Si, S, C, O, and H, but their abundances in the Earth's core remain highly debated.
Seismic observations may provide important constraints on the chemical compositions of Earth's core. It was revealed that Earth's inner core transmits shear waves at anomalously low velocity. Although considerable efforts have been devoted to understanding this phenomenon in the past two decades, there is no one solution model that can match all seismic observations and geochemical constraints. In this talk, I will introduce our recent findings on H-bearing alloys under inner-core conditions. The superionic state of the inner core can explain the observed density and velocities simultaneously. Our findings reveal that hydrogen is a fundamental light element in the Earth's core.
Neutrinos change flavor as they travel, and this probability depends on the density of electrons in the material they are traveling through. So, we can use neutrinos produced in the atmosphere by cosmic rays to tell us about the density of electrons in the Earth. In this talk, I will present our simulations of this phenomenon that we did in determining the sensitivity of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) to the size of the Earth’s core.
This talk will show how the Earth's density profile can be measured in the DUNE experiment using atmospheric neutrinos. After crossing the Earth, neutrinos give us access to a rich oscillation phenomenology that strongly depends on the matter potential sourced by the Earth. By performing a detailed simulation of the event reconstruction capabilities of liquid argon time projection chambers, where we have included the particle identification and the nuclear effects, we find that DUNE can measure the Earth's total mass at 8.4% precision with an exposure of 400~kton~year. In this result, we also include the different uncertainties that affect the atmospheric neutrino flux. Considering an effective Earth model with 3 layers, we have explored the sensitivity to each layer by combining DUNE with external measurements of the total mass and the moment of inertial of the Earth. Our analysis indicates that the core, lower mantle, and upper mantle densities can be determined with 8.8%, 13%, and 22% precision for the same exposure.
Coffee Break
MicroBooNE is a $85$ tonne active mass liquid argon time projection chamber on the Booster Neutrino Beam at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Studying neutral pion production in the MicroBooNE detector provides an opportunity to better understand neutrino-argon interactions, and is crucial for future accelerator-based neutrino oscillation experiments. This analysis presents the progress towards the first measurement of the differential cross section for $\pi^0$ production in neutrino-argon interactions. Using a dataset corresponding to about $7\times 10^{20}$ protons on target, we present an analysis which aims to measure
the single differential cross sections as a function of the pion and muon kinematic variables such as the momentum and the scattering angle.
In the T2K experiment, new detectors are going to be installed to the near detector.
Super-FGD is one of them and a tracker which consists of 2 millions plastic scintillator cubes.
60 thousands wave length shifting fibers will be inserted to the cubes to lead scintillation light and it will be detected by SiPMs.
I will report the procedure to construct and install this detector.
The first step of construction is to insert fibers to the cubes.
This work should be done quickly because we have the 60 thousands fibers.
Our concern about it is that inserted fibers can be damaged by distortion of array of cubes and we have to check the quality of fibers during inserting the fibers.
I will also talk about a dedicated system for the fiber quality check.
The Telescope Array (TA) experiment, located near Delta, Utah, USA, is the largest ultra-high energy cosmic ray (UHECR) observatory in the northern hemisphere. When a UHECR primary particle arrives at the Earth, it collides with the atmosphere and produces a cascade of secondary particles known as an extensive air shower (EAS). The Telescope Array is designed to observe the EAS using a hybrid of techniques: fluorescence detectors (FDs) and surface detectors (SDs). The FDs measure the nitrogen fluorescence light emitted when the secondary particles excite the gas of the atmosphere as they pass through it. They utilize telescopes consisting of large area mirrors and photo-multiplier tube cameras. Meanwhile, the SDs use two-layer plastic scintillators to sample the density of charged particles in the showers when it reaches the Earth’s surface. Using data from both the FDs and SDs, we explore the nature and origin of UHECRs by investigating the energy spectrum, mass composition, and arrival direction distribution. In this presentation, we describe the design and technical features as well as some of the measurements of the Telescope Array detectors.
The Mu2e experiment at Fermilab will search for the charged-lepton flavor-violating process of a neutrino-less muon-to-electron decay in the presence of a nucleus. The experiment expects a single-event sensitivity of 2.9*10−17, which is four orders of magnitude below the current strongest limits on this process. This requires all backgrounds to sum to fewer than one event over the lifetime of the experiment. One major background is due to cosmic-ray muons producing electrons that fake a signal inside of the Mu2e apparatus. The Mu2e Cosmic Ray Veto (CRV) has been designed to veto these cosmic-ray backgrounds with an efficiency of 99.99 percent, while causing a low dead time and operating in a high-intensity environment. The design and fabrication status of the CRV are discussed.
An optical Time Projection Chamber (TPC) is proposed for future neutrino experiments. Its excellent particle detection momentum threshold, together with cost-effective scale-up prospects, make the TPC a strong candidate for reducing systematic errors due to neutrino-nucleus interactions.
In order to produce a high number of photons, the TPC is equipped with a thick gaseous electron multiplier (ThGEM). Per each electron produced in the ThGEM holes, thousands of photons are created. Next, the electrons created in the ThGEM are extracted and drifted further towards a mesh. Here, by applying a high enough electric field to excite the Argon atoms, but low enough in order not to ionise them, electroluminescence (EL) photons are produced. The photons, normally in the UV range, are shifted to visible using a PEN wavelength shifter.
The firsts tests of the chamber were carried with a photo-multiplier tube. Several methods, including drift velocity, and trigger rate studies confirm that the TPC works as expected.
For a second phase of tests, voltage was placed on the EL mesh too, and a light yield increase was observed, as expected due to the electroluminescence effect. Surprisingly, a yield increase was observed even for small electric fields. This can not be explained through EL but it is rather an effect of the electrons being forced out of the ThGEM holes; the more towards the exterior the photons are produced, the less they get absorbed by the walls of the ThGEM.
For a third, and final study of the TPC, a 256 SiPM array has been set up.
Simulations show that by using two simple bi-convex lenses, hundreds of photons can be detected per cosmic-ray crossing the detector. Moreover, magnitudes of up to 12 can be obtained. In other words, if a particle leaves a track of 12cm in the real detector, the projected image on the SiPM array is only 1cm.
Currently, the SiPM array is in its first analysis phase, being very close to its first full track reconstruction. Thank you!
The MicroBooNE detector is a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) with an 85 ton active mass that receives flux from the Booster Neutrino and the Neutrinos from the Main Injector (NuMI) beams, providing excellent spatial resolution of the reconstructed final state particles. Since 2015 MicroBooNE has accumulated many neutrino and anti-neutrino scattering events with argon nuclei enabling searches for rare interaction channels.
The Cabibbo suppressed production of hyperons in anti-neutrino-nucleus interactions provides sensitivity to a range of effects, including second class currents, SU(3) symmetry violations and reinteractions between the hyperon and the nuclear remnant. This channel exclusively involves anti-neutrinos, offering an unambiguous constraint on wrong sign contamination. The effects of nucleon structure and final state interactions are distinct from those affecting the quasielastic channel and modify the Λ and Σ production cross sections in different ways, providing new information that could help to break their degeneracy. Few measurements of this channel have been made, primarily in older experiments such as Gargamelle [1,2].
We present the measurement of the cross section for direct (Cabibbo suppressed) Λ production in muon anti-neutrino interactions with argon nuclei in the MicroBooNE detector, using neutrinos from the off-axis NuMI beam. The event selection and treatment of systematic uncertainties will also be described.
[1] O. Erriquez et al., Nucl. Phys. B140, 123 (1978)
[2] O. Erriquez et al., Phys. Lett. B 70, 383 (1977)
The Mu2e Cosmic Ray Veto must veto cosmic-ray muons over a large area with an efficiency of 99.99% in the presence of high background rates. It consists of over 5000 scintillator extrusions with embedded wavelength-shifting fibers coupled to 2×2 mm2 silicon photomultipliers. A custom readout system consists of: (1) small circuit board, the Counter Mother Board, which provides a temperature sensor, flasher LEDs, and passive SiPM pulse shaping; (2) a Front End Board which digitizes, zero-suppresses, and stores signals from up to 64 Counter Mother Boards, provides bias to the SiPMs, pulses to the LEDs, and a measurement of the SiPM currents; and (3) a Readout Controller which collects data from the Front End Boards via Cat6 cables, which also deliver 48V power to the Front End Boards using power over ethernet. The Readout Controller serves as the interface between the Front End Boards and the DAQ. This poster provides an overview of this high rate readout system for the Mu2e Cosmic Ray Veto.
The Mu2e experiment uses a cylindrical straw tube tracker operated in vacuum to provide a high precision momentum measurement of 105 MeV/c electrons that are the signal of charged lepton flavor violating (CLFV) muon to electron conversion. The tracker is instrumented with custom front-end electronics based on PolarFire FPGAs that sit at the outer radius of the tracker. Each straw is read out at both ends, and precise firmware TDCs allow for time-division based reconstruction of the hit position along the wire. The data is read out over optical fibers by the TDAQ system. The design, testing, and performance of the tracker electronics will be presented.
The JSNS2 experiment aims to search for the existence of sterile neutrino oscillations with deltam2 near 1eV2 at J-PARC MLF. A 1MW beam of 3 GeV protons incident on a spallation neutron target produces an intense neutrino beam from muon decay at rest. The experiment will search for muon antineutrino to electron antineutrino oscillations which can be detected by the inverse beta decay interaction followed by gammas from neutron capture on Gd. PMT in the detector is an essential device to find a signal in JSNS2 experiment. Currently, there are 120 PMTs in JSNS2 detector. But, since the performance of PMTs is not uniform, it is necessary to get the consistency of each PMTs. For that, we have calculated the PMT gains to have a calibration using a laser. However, the method can not monitor the gain in real-time. Thus, instead of that, the gain was monitored by using regular data in real-time. But, it is not sensitive to monitor due to multiple PE of the regular data. So, we developed an algorithm for the gain calibration method using dark hits in an off-time region of regular data.
The constituents of dark matter are still unknown, and the viable possibilities span a very large mass range. The scenario where dark matter originates from thermal contact with familiar matter in the early Universe requires the DM mass to lie within about an MeV to 100 TeV. Considerable experimental attention has been given to exploring Weakly Interacting Massive Particles in the upper end of this range (few GeV – ~TeV), while the region ~MeV to ~GeV is largely unexplored. If there is an interaction between light DM and ordinary matter, as there must be in the case of a thermal origin, then there necessarily is a production mechanism in accelerator-based experiments. The Light Dark Matter eXperiment (LDMX) is a planned electron-beam fixed-target missing-momentum experiment that has unique sensitivity to light DM in the sub-GeV range. Relevant to NuFact, LDMX is capable of measuring inclusive and semi-exclusive lepton scattering that can be used to inform interaction modeling for neutrinos in a way that is complementary to other neutrino and electron scattering experiments. Relevant to the muon working group is a proposal for a muon beam version of LDMX that would probe the electron-phobic scenario. This contribution will give an overview of the theoretical motivation, the main experimental challenges and how they are addressed, the status of the LDMX experiment, as well as projected sensitivities in comparison to other experiments.
The MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) experiment is pursuing a broad range of neutrino physics measurements, including some of the first high-statistics results for neutrino-argon scattering cross sections. At the neutrino energies relevant for MicroBooNE and its companion experiments in the Fermilab Short-Baseline Neutrino program, the dominant event topology involves mesonless final states containing one or more protons. A complete description of these events requires modeling the contributions of quasielastic and two-particle two-hole neutrino interactions as well as more inelastic reaction modes in which final-state mesons are reabsorbed by the residual nucleus. Refinements to the current understanding of these processes, informed by new neutrino cross-section data, will enable a precise and reliable interpretation of future measurements of neutrino oscillations and searches for exotic physics processes involving neutrinos. This poster presents the first double-differential cross-section results from MicroBooNE for mesonless charged-current scattering of muon neutrinos on argon.
Proceedings, Conference Tours, ...
In order to achieve the ambitious goal of characterising neutrino flavour oscillations with percent-level precision, it is critical for current and future long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments to substantially reduce existing systematic uncertainties. The most challenging of such systematic uncertainties is related with the modelling few-GeV neutrino-nucleus interactions.
To improve our understanding, the T2K collaboration is engaged in a continuous effort to implement up-to-date theoretical models in T2K’s Monte Carlo event generator (NEUT) and to define a suitable parametrisation of the model’s uncertainties as an input for neutrino oscillation analyses. The new uncertainty model, developed for the latest T2K oscillation measurement, will be presented, as well as a comparison of the model to available global lepton- and hadron-scattering data. Among other improvements, the latest model includes: a parametrisation offering substantial freedom to the input Spectral Function for charged-current quasi-elastic (CCQE) interactions; a momentum transfer dependent correction to the nuclear removal energy for CCQE interactions based on inclusive electron scattering data; and an updated treatment of nuclear medium effects in resonant pion production interactions.
Knowledge of neutrino interaction cross-sections are critical for accurately carrying out neutrino oscillation measurements. However, current models do not fully agree with data, requiring every experimental collaboration to choose the best available models, adjust them as appropriate, and assign sufficient systematic uncertainties before any oscillation analysis can take place. This talk highlights how the NOvA collaboration has dealt with this issue.
The high statistics and excellent resolution capabilities of DUNE's $^{40}$Ar detector will allow us to make precise studies about phenomena that have, until now, seemed too complex to measure, like tau neutrinos $(\nu_{\tau})$ detection and therefore, provide a completion of the 3-flavor neutrino paradigm. Quasi-elastic scattering (QE), $\Delta$ resonance production (RES), and deep inelastic scattering (DIS) processes are known to give dominant contributions in the medium and high neutrino energy to the total cross-section of $\nu_{\tau}$(N) and $\bar{\nu}_{\tau}$(N) cross-sections. These cross-sections have large systematic uncertainties compared to the ones for $\nu_{\mu}$ and $\nu_{e}$. Studies point out that the reason for these difference is due to the model dependence of the $\nu_{\tau}$(N) cross-sections in treating the nuclear medium effects described by the nucleon structure functions, $F_{1N,...,3N}(x, Q^{2})$ for $\nu_{\mu}$ and $\nu_{e}$. These nucleon structure functions are used to calculate DIS cross-section by including kinematical corrections, but due to the addition of the $\tau$-lepton mass another two additional nucleon structure functions become non-negligible, $F_{4N}(x, Q^{2})$ and $F_{5N}(x, Q^{2})$. There is a special interest in the DIS processes originated by charged leptons and (anti)neutrinos on nucleons and nuclear targets as they play an instrumental role in the quark-parton structure of the free nucleons and nucleons when they are bound in a nucleus. This talk will show the semi-theoretical and experimental approach to the estimation of the $\nu_{\tau}$(N) and $\bar{\nu}_{\tau}$(N) cross-sections in DUNE for the DIS region. We aim to look over changes in Q$^{2}$, and the contributions of the additional nucleon structure functions $F_{4N}(x, Q^{2})$ and $F_{5N}(x, Q^{2})$.
Simulation plays a critical role in neutrino experiments. But for a variety of reasons no simulation is perfect, and experiments must confront discrepancies between simulated predictions and their own measurements and observations. This inevitably leads to the need to tune the simulation in order to obtain robust and reasonable systematic uncertainties in analyses. In this talk I give an overview of the challenges that both simulation developers and experiments face, and the mechanisms employed by various collaborations to deal with this challenge using new experimental results in neutrino-nucleus scattering as examples.
The European Spallation Source (ESS), currently under construction in Lund, Sweden, will be the brightest spallation neutron source in the world, when its driving superconducting proton linac achieves the design power of 5 MW at 2 GeV. Such a high power linac requires production, efficient acceleration, and almost no-loss transport of a high current beam (62.5 mA), thus making its design and beam commissioning challenging. Beam commissioning for the normal-conducting part of the linac is ongoing in stages. In 2022, the beam was accelerated up to the first tank of the five-tank drift-tube linac. This presentation provides a brief summary of the ESS linac project and presents highlights from ongoing beam commissioning.
The PIP-II and DUNE/LBNF projects will constitute a 1.2 MW long-baseline neutrino facility at Fermilab. The DUNE/LBNF Phase II calls for a 2.4 MW proton power upgrade, and this talk will outline one compelling path towards achieving that benchmark and also provides a robust experimental program at other energies. The proposed facility include a CW-capable 2GeV linac, a 2 GeV 0.5-2 MW pulsed proton ring, a 0.75-1 MW 8 GeV pulsed program, and a path to a 4 MW upgrade of DUNE/LBNF. Opportunities for neutrino and muon programs will be highlighted.
The main ring synchrotron (MR) of Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) has provided world-leading-intensity protons for the long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment (T2K). We launched the upgrade plan to increase the beam power for realizing higher precision physics experiments. The beam power for T2K was 515 kW before the upgrade, and we aim at 1.3 MW by 2028. One of the most important upgrades is shortening the repetition period from 2.48 s to 1.32 s by reconstructing the magnet power supplies. We replaced all the power supplies in the long shutdown in JFY2021 and restarted the beam operation in 2022. In this presentation, we will describe the first results of the beam studies with faster cycling. We will also state the further strategy to achieve the new beam power target.
We report on the MEG II experiment, a search for the charged lepton flavor violating (CLFV) decay $\mu^{+} \rightarrow e^{+} \gamma$. The experiment is designed to improve upon the previous most sensitive search, done by the MEG experiment, by an order of magnitude: a sensitivity of $4.2 \cdot 10^{−13} \rightarrow 6 \cdot 10^{−14}$ at the 90% confidence level. The positron and photon kinematic properties are measured in a magnetic spectrometer and a liquid xenon calorimeter respectively. MEG II implements a variety of upgrades to achieve better sensitivity including a new lightweight stereo drift chamber for improved $e^{+}$ kinematic resolution, a new array of 512 scintillator timing counter tiles for improved $e^{+}$ timing, a new set of 4092 silicon photo multipliers on the calorimeter's inner face for improved $\gamma$ kinematic resolution, and a higher $\mu^+$ beam rate. The experiment completed it's first year of data collection in 2021. We will discuss preliminary $e^{+}$ and $\gamma$ data-driven kinematic resolution measurements and compare them to MEG results and the MEG II design expectation. Estimates of the first year and projected final single event sensitivity will also be given.
Being an accidental symmetry in the Standard Model (SM), the conservation of lepton flavour is violated in many extensions of the SM. There is a global effort to search for lepton flavour violation (LFV) at high intensity muon sources to which the upcoming Mu3e experiment at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) will contribute.
The Mu3e Collaboration aims to perform a background-free search for the LFV decay $\mu^+ \rightarrow e^+e^−e^+$ with an unprecedented sensitivity in the order of $10^{-15}$ in the first phase of operation, and $10^{-16}$ in the final phase - an improvement over the preceding SINDRUM experiment by four orders of magnitude. The innovative experimental concept is based on a tracking detector built from novel ultra-thin silicon pixel sensors and scintillating fibres and tiles. The momentum resolution is further improved by a dedicated track reconstruction for low-momentum electrons. The full detector information is read out continuously. The data rate is reduced by realtime online event reconstruction and filtering on a GPU-based filter farm. The experiment is operated with a continuous muon beam in the order of $10^{8}\mu^+/s$ in phase I at an existing beamline at PSI, and in excess of $10^{9}\mu^+/s$ in phase II at the future High Intensity Muon Beam facility.
The experimental concept including recent developments in the construction of the phase I experiment as well as physics opportunities will be presented.
The Mu2e experiment, currently under construction at Fermilab, will search for the neutrinoless conversion of a muon into an electron in the field of an aluminum nucleus. A clear signature of this charged lepton flavor violating two-body process is given by the monoenergetic conversion electron of 104.97 MeV produced in the final state. The experimental apparatus consists of an intense pulsed proton beam interacting on a tungsten target; a set of superconducting magnets that selects negative muons; a segmented aluminum target that stops the muons; and a set of detectors used to both identify conversion electrons and reject beam and cosmic backgrounds. The experiment will need 3-5 years of data-taking to achieve a factor of $10^4$ improvement on the current best limit on the conversion rate. After an introduction to the physics of Mu2e, we will report on the status of the different components of the experimental apparatus. We conclude with our current estimate of the experiment’s sensitivity and discovery potential.
Three mysteries stand after the discovery of the Higgs boson: (i) the origin of the masses of the neutrinos; (ii) the origin of the baryon asymmetry in the universe; and (iii) the nature of dark matter. The FCC-ee provides an exciting opportunity to resolve these mysteries with the discovery of heavy neutral leptons (HNLs), in particular using the large sample (5.10^12) Z bosons produced in early running at the Z resonance using the production process e+e- --> Z --> vN. The expected very small mixing between light and heavy neutrinos leads to very small mixing angles, resulting in very long lifetimes for the HNL and in spectacular signal topology. Although the final state in this reaction appears to be charge-insensitive, it is nevertheless possible to distinguish the Dirac vs Majorana nature of the neutrinos, by a variety of methods that will be discussed. A Majorana nature could have considerable implication for the generation of the Baryon Asymmetry of the Universe.
In accordance with the WG subject, we are concerned with the fundamental question of the number of neutrino species existing in nature. We report on a theoretical description of the mixing space based on singular values, contractions, and dilation procedures. With a bird’s eye perspective, it provides an independent way of doing neutrino mixing analysis allowing for quantitative searches of extra neutrino states, establishing alternative limits on the “active-sterile” mixing, defining disjoint physical regions of the mixings among scenarios with a different number of sterile neutrinos. We give the pros and cons of the method. Concerning applications to phenomenological studies, going beyond PMNS, we try to understand the emergence of complete models with masses and mixings of heavy neutrino states and potential implications for collider and cosmological studies.
The MicroBooNE collaboration recently released a series of measurements aimed at investigating the nature of the excess of low energy electromagnetic interactions observed by the MiniBooNE collaboration. In the talk, we will present the results on the search for an anomalous excess of electron neutrino events. This search was performed leveraging three independent analyses which target different charged current electron neutrino final-state topologies. The talk will include details on event selection, background estimation, systematic analysis and cross-checks. We additionally will highlight new results that use these well understood charged-current electron neutrino and muon neutrino event selections to perform a search of an eV scale sterile neutrino in the full 3+1 oscillation framework. Constraints will be presented for regions of sterile neutrino parameter space relevant to the Gallium $\nu_e$ disappearance anomaly and LSND/MiniBooNE $\nu_e$ appearance anomalies.
A new photosensor module that consists of 19 3-inch photomultiplier tubes has been developed for the Hyper-Kamiokande experiment, a next generation neutrino experiment. This talk will present the current status of the new photosensor module development and how the module will be used in the water Cherenkov test experiment and the intermediate water Chereknov detector that will be one of the near detectors to be used in the Hyper-Kamiokade long-baseline program.
Hyper-Kamiokande (HK) consists of a large Water Cherenkov detector, far detector (FD), and neutrino beam line, J-PARC. The FD is under construction now, and will be equipped with 20,000 PMTs whose diameter is 20 inch. It is improved and has twice better performance than that of Super-Kamiokande detector. For the 20 inch PMTs, we have been developing several types of readout electronics. They are required to utilize the improved performance as much as possible. This talk presents detailed schemes of each option and the status of R&D.
The construction of the next-generation far detector Hyper-Kamiokande (HK) has started. It will have ten times larger fiducial volume and increased detection performances. The data taking is planned for 2027. Time stability is crucial, as detecting physics events relies on reconstructing Cherenkov rings based on the coincidence between the photomultipliers. The above requires a timebase jitter smaller than 100 ps. In addition, since this detector will be used to detect neutrinos produced by the J-PARC accelerator in Tokai, each event needs to be timed with a precision of less than 100 ns with respect to UTC in order to be associated with a proton spill from J-PARC.
The HK collaboration is in an R&D phase and several groups are working in parallel, exploring various solutions for the electronics system. This talk will present the studies related to a novel design for the time synchronization system. We will discuss the clock generation, including the connection scheme between the GNSS receiver (Septentrio) and the atomic clock (free-running Rubidium), the precise calibration of atomic clock and algorithms to correct errors on satellites orbits, the redundancy of the system ; and a two-stage distribution system that sends the clock encoded in the data stream, using a custom protocol.
We look at the PMTs, bases, and digitizers for the IceCube Observatory: the original installed IceCube Gen1 modules, the under-construction IceCube Upgrade modules, and the proposed IceCube Gen2 modules. Will also look at the proposed solutions for the Southern Wide-field Gamma-ray Observatory (SWGO). Of particular interest is the customization of tubes at the factory, and a powerful micro-controller-centered active base design.
The Short-Baseline Near Detector (SBND) will be one of three Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) neutrino detectors positioned along the axis of the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) at Fermilab, as part of the Short-Baseline Neutrino (SBN) Program. The detector is currently in the construction phase and is anticipated to begin operation in 2023. SBND is characterized by superb imaging capabilities and will record over a million neutrino interactions per year. Thanks to its unique combination of measurement resolution and statistics, SBND will carry out a rich program of neutrino interaction measurements and novel searches for physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM). It will enable the potential of the overall SBN sterile neutrino program by performing a precise characterization of the unoscillated event rate, and constraining BNB flux and neutrino-argon cross-section systematic uncertainties. In this talk, the physics reach, current status, and future prospects of SBND are discussed.
The ICARUS collaboration employed the 760-ton T600 detector in a successful three-year physics run at the underground LNGS laboratories studying neutrino oscillations with the CNGS neutrino beam from CERN, and searching for atmospheric neutrino interactions. ICARUS performed a sensitive search for LSND-like anomalous νe appearance in the CNGS beam, which contributed to the constraints on the allowed parameters to a narrow region around 1 eV$^2$, where all the experimental results can be coherently accommodated at 90% C.L. After a significant overhaul at CERN, the T600 detector has been installed at Fermilab. In 2020 cryogenic commissioning began with detector cool down, liquid Argon filling and recirculation. ICARUS has started operations and is presently in its commissioning phase, collecting the first neutrino events from the Booster Neutrino Beam and the NuMI off-axis. The main goal of the first year of ICARUS data taking will then be the definitive verification of the recent claim by NEUTRINO-4 short baseline reactor experiment both in the $\nu_\mu$ channel with the BNB and in the $\nu_e$ with NuMI. After the first year of operations, ICARUS will commence its search for evidence of a sterile neutrino jointly with the SBND near detector, within the Short Baseline Neutrino (SBN) program. The ICARUS exposure to the NuMI beam will also give the possibility for other physics studies such as light dark matter searches and neutrino-Argon cross section measurements. The proposed contribution will address ICARUS achievements, its status and plans for the new run at Fermilab and the ongoing developments of the analysis tools needed to fulfill its physics program.
SBND is a 112-ton liquid argon time projection chamber located on the Booster Neutrino Beam at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and is the near detector of the Short-Baseline Neutrino program. The primary goals of SBND are to provide flux constraints for sterile neutrino searches, conduct world-leading neutrino cross section measurements on argon, and perform beyond the Standard Model (BSM) physics searches with its high-precision particle identification capabilities. In this talk, I will discuss SBND’s prospects and tools for detecting a variety of BSM phenomena produced in a neutrino beam, such as sub-GeV dark matter, dark neutrinos, millicharged particles, and others.
Various short-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments have yielded unexpected results, which hint at the existence of light sterile neutrinos. IceCube has performed a unique search for sterile neutrinos by exploiting matter-enhanced resonant oscillations, which can be probed using atmospheric and astrophysical neutrinos in the TeV energy regime. The analysis uses the world’s largest sample of Earth-crossing muon neutrino events from eight years of IceCube data with a purity above 99.9%. We present new sensitivities in this analysis using both new event selection and energy reconstruction based on machine learning techniques.
NOvA is a long-baseline neutrino experiment optimised for studying neutrino oscillations in the NuMI beam. The experiment consists of two functionally identical liquid scintillator detectors at baselines of 1km and 810km, with the latter placed 14.6 mrad from the beam’s central axis.
This talk summarises beyond-standard-model neutrino oscillation results from NOvA, including the recent search for 3+1 sterile neutrino oscillations in neutrino beam using $11.0 \times 10^{20}$ protons on target (POT) in the near detector and $13.6 \times 10^{20}$ POT in the far detector. This analysis utilises charged current $\nu_{\mu}$ and neutral current selections in a two-detector fit procedure utilising a Gaussian multivariate treatment of systematic uncertainties and a Poisson likelihood treatment of statistical uncertainties to place 90% CL limits on the $\Delta m_{41}^{2}$, $\theta_{24}$ and $\theta_{34}$ mixing parameters.
A search for non-standard interactions that augment the standard 3-flavour oscillation paradigm is also presented, utilising charged current $\nu_{\mu}$ and $\nu_{e}$ selections in neutrino and antineutrino beam modes to produce 90% CL allowed regions for the $\epsilon_{e \tau}$ and $\delta_{e \tau}$ parameters.
The main source of systematic uncertainty on neutrino cross section measurements at the GeV scale originates from the poor knowledge of the initial flux. The goal of cutting down this uncertainty to 1% can be achieved through the monitoring of charged leptons produced in association with neutrinos, by properly instrumenting the decay region of a conventional narrow-band neutrino beam. Large angle muons and positrons from kaons are measured by a sampling calorimeter on the decay tunnel walls, while muon stations after the hadron dump can be used to monitor the neutrino component from pion decays. This instrumentation can provide a full control on both the muon and electron neutrino fluxes at all energies. Furthermore, the narrow momentum width (<10%) of the beam provides a 0(10%) measurement of the neutrino energy on an event by event basis, thanks to its correlation with the radial position of the interaction at the neutrino detector. The ENUBET project has been funded by the ERC in 2016 to prove the feasibility of such a monitored neutrino beam and, since 2019, ENUBET is a CERN neutrino platform experiment (NP06/ENUBET). In this talk we will present the final results of the ERC project, together with the complete assessment of the feasibility of its concept. The breakthrough the project achieved is the design of a horn-less beamline that allows for a 1% measurement of $\nu_e$ and $\nu_\mu$ cross sections in about 3 years of data taking at CERN-SPS using ProtoDUNE as far detector. Thanks to the replacement of the horn with a static focusing system (2 s proton extraction) we reduce the pile up by two orders of magnitude, and we can monitor leptons from pion and kaon decays with a signal/background >2. We will hence discuss the implementation of a monitored neutrino beam at CERN and FNAL, its performance and perspectives for a new generation of cross section experiments to study neutrino-nucleus interactions and improve the physics reach of DUNE and Hyper-Kamiokande.
The Light Dark Matter eXperiment (LDMX) is a proposed small-scale accelerator experiment designed to search for dark matter using missing energy and momentum techniques from multi-GeV electro-nuclear interactions. In order to detect and veto against energy losses from standard electro-nuclear scattering processes, the detector design features charged particle tracking and hermetic calorimetry for both electromagnetic and hadronic activity in a region within 40 degrees of the incident electron beam. These same characteristics make the experiment capable of measuring inclusive and semi-exclusive lepton scattering that can be used to inform interaction modeling for neutrinos – particularly for the upcoming Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) – in a way that is complementary to other neutrino and electron scattering experiments. We present the capability of LDMX to conduct a rich physics program in electro-nuclear scattering measurements of high relevance to current and future neutrino experiments.
The ability of current and next generation accelerator-based neutrino-oscillation measurements to
reach their desired sensitivity requires a detailed understanding of neutrino-nucleus interactions.
These include precise knowledge of the relevant cross sections and of our ability to reconstruct
the incident neutrino energy from the measured final state particles. Incomplete understanding of
these interactions can skew the reconstructed neutrino spectrum and therefore bias the extraction
of fundamental oscillation parameters. In this talk, I will present new wide phase-space electron-
nucleus scattering data, collected using the decommissioned CLAS6 spectrometer at the Thomas
Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab), where we studied how well we can reconstruct the
incident lepton energy from the measured final state particles. Disagreements with the commonly
used GENIE event generator are observed, indicating a potential bias for future oscillation analyses
and pointing the way for improving these event generators.
State-of-the-art predictions of accelerator-based neutrino fluxes have uncertainties ranging from 5-15%, dominated by hadron production uncertainties. The EMPHATIC Collaboration has proposed a unique, compact spectrometer to measure hadron-scattering and hadron-production cross sections that are needed to reduce neutrino flux uncertainties for current and future neutrino experiments to the few-percent level. In this talk I present an overview of the motivation, design and run plan of the experiment, and progress in data collection and analysis.
The AlCap experiment recently published its first results on the yields and energy spectra of heavy particles emitted after the nuclear muon capture process. These detailed measurements quantify an important hit background to the Mu2e and COMET experiments, which will search for charged lepton flavor violation. These results greatly expand the literature in this area with first measurements on Ti and of tritons, as well as improve the precision in the energy range relevant to the upcoming muon-to-electron conversion experiments. In this talk, I will describe the experiment and present the results.
The one of an experiment to search for the charged lepton flavor violating process, muon-electron conversion in a nuclear field , DeeMe, is being prepared at the J-PARC MLF H-line in Japan. This experiment utilizes a pulsed proton beam from the Rapid Cycle Synchrotron (RCS). A graphite target is bombarded with a pulsed proton beam and negative pion production and pion-in-flight-decay to negative muon, then creation of muonic atoms are caused in the same pion production target. And a converted electron is expected to emit about after 1~2 micro second delayed timing due to muon atom binding. Also two body reaction of the new process $\mu$ + (A,Z) → e + (A,Z) results in 105 MeV monoenergetic electron. Therefore, 1~2 micro second delayed 105MeV monoenergetic electron is a searched signal. Electrons around 100 MeV are transported by the H-Line and analyzed by the dipole magnet (0.4T) and four MWPCs (two upstream of the dipole magnet and two downstream of the dipole magnet).
However, the burst pulse reaching to $10^8$ charged particles/pulse attributable to the RCS pulse makes large dead time for the MWPC. So, HV switching scheme is introduced where at the burst time the voltages between anode wires and potential wires set the same so as to lower the gas gain to be O(1) while at the delayed timing the voltages between them set ~1500V so as to increase the gas gain to be O($10^4$) rapidly. The signal is recorded by the flash ADC and the single electron signal was obtained successfully. The target single event sensitivity is $10^{-13}$. At the present moment, all the magnet components of the H-line have been connected with the vacuum pipe, and the commissioning is going on in a good shape. In this talk, the experimental basis, the commissioning status of the H-Line and the DeeMe experiment are presented.
Muon to electron conversion, an example of charged lepton flavour violation (CLFV), provides a clear experimental probe into new physics beyond the Standard Model. The COMET experiment at J-PARC will use the highest intensity muon beam to search for muon to electron conversion using a staged approach, with sensitivity levels in reach of many new physics models. With a single event sensitivity of $3\times10^{-15}$ in Phase-I and $3\times10^{-15}$ in Phase-II, COMET will provide about x100 and x10000 improvement on current muon to electron conversion bounds respectively. In addition, an initial stage called Phase-$\alpha$ is being prepared to measure extinction protons and provide more precise muon and pion production rates for these upcoming physics runs. Construction of Phase-I is in progress with physics runs expected to start in 2024. This talk will provide an overview of the physics motivations for COMET and the current status of Phase-$\alpha$, Phase-I and Phase-II development.
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is an upcoming neutrino physics experiment that will answer some of the most compelling questions in particle physics and cosmology. The DUNE Far Detector (FD) exploits silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) to detect scintillation photons produced by the interaction of charged particles in the liquid Argon time projection chamber (LArTPC).
The SiPMs are photosensors consisting of a matrix of single-photon avalanche diodes (SPAD) operating in the Geiger-Mueller region. Their high sensitivity and dynamic range, as well as the possibility to fill large surfaces with high-granularity sensors, makes them an ideal choice for the DUNE FD photodetection system.
An international consortium of research groups is currently engaged in systematic quality assurance tests of all the sensors that will be installed in the FD to control their specifications. A custom set-up, CACTUS (Cryogenic Apparatus for Continuous Tests Upon SiPMs), has been developed at Ferrara and Bologna Universities-INFN sites to perform automatically the tests for a large number of sensors in parallel. This system can characterize up to 120 SiPM simultaneously both testing their mechanical and thermal resistance, and measuring the complete current-voltage curve for each sensor at room and cryogenic temperatures. These data allow to extrapolate the quenching resistor (R_q) and the breakdown voltage (V_bd), the key operating parameters of the SiPMs.
Furthermore, the CACTUS test facility allows to perform dark noise characterization through a custom-made fixed threshold
amplifier-discriminator system.
The JSNS2 experiment aims to search for the existence of sterile neutrino oscillations with deltam2 near 1eV2 at J-PARC MLF. A 1MW beam of 3 GeV protons incident on a spallation neutron target produces an intense neutrino beam from muon decay at rest. The experiment will search for muon antineutrino to electron antineutrino oscillations which can be detected by the inverse beta decay interaction followed by gammas from neutron capture on Gd. PMT in the detector is an essential device to find a signal in JSNS2 experiment. Currently, there are 120 PMTs in JSNS2 detector. But, since the performance of PMTs is not uniform, it is necessary to get the consistency of each PMTs. For that, we have calculated the PMT gains to have a calibration using a laser. However, the method can not monitor the gain in real-time. Thus, instead of that, the gain was monitored by using regular data in real-time. But, it is not sensitive to monitor due to multiple PE of the regular data. So, we developed an algorithm for the gain calibration method using dark hits in an off-time region of regular data.
The Mu2e Cosmic Ray Veto must veto cosmic-ray muons over a large area with an efficiency of 99.99% in the presence of high background rates. It consists of over 5000 scintillator extrusions with embedded wavelength-shifting fibers coupled to 2×2 mm2 silicon photomultipliers. A custom readout system consists of: (1) small circuit board, the Counter Mother Board, which provides a temperature sensor, flasher LEDs, and passive SiPM pulse shaping; (2) a Front End Board which digitizes, zero-suppresses, and stores signals from up to 64 Counter Mother Boards, provides bias to the SiPMs, pulses to the LEDs, and a measurement of the SiPM currents; and (3) a Readout Controller which collects data from the Front End Boards via Cat6 cables, which also deliver 48V power to the Front End Boards using power over ethernet. The Readout Controller serves as the interface between the Front End Boards and the DAQ. This poster provides an overview of this high rate readout system for the Mu2e Cosmic Ray Veto.
An optical Time Projection Chamber (TPC) is proposed for future neutrino experiments. Its excellent particle detection momentum threshold, together with cost-effective scale-up prospects, make the TPC a strong candidate for reducing systematic errors due to neutrino-nucleus interactions.
In order to produce a high number of photons, the TPC is equipped with a thick gaseous electron multiplier (ThGEM). Per each electron produced in the ThGEM holes, thousands of photons are created. Next, the electrons created in the ThGEM are extracted and drifted further towards a mesh. Here, by applying a high enough electric field to excite the Argon atoms, but low enough in order not to ionise them, electroluminescence (EL) photons are produced. The photons, normally in the UV range, are shifted to visible using a PEN wavelength shifter.
The firsts tests of the chamber were carried with a photo-multiplier tube. Several methods, including drift velocity, and trigger rate studies confirm that the TPC works as expected.
For a second phase of tests, voltage was placed on the EL mesh too, and a light yield increase was observed, as expected due to the electroluminescence effect. Surprisingly, a yield increase was observed even for small electric fields. This can not be explained through EL but it is rather an effect of the electrons being forced out of the ThGEM holes; the more towards the exterior the photons are produced, the less they get absorbed by the walls of the ThGEM.
For a third, and final study of the TPC, a 256 SiPM array has been set up.
Simulations show that by using two simple bi-convex lenses, hundreds of photons can be detected per cosmic-ray crossing the detector. Moreover, magnitudes of up to 12 can be obtained. In other words, if a particle leaves a track of 12cm in the real detector, the projected image on the SiPM array is only 1cm.
Currently, the SiPM array is in its first analysis phase, being very close to its first full track reconstruction. Thank you!
In the T2K experiment, new detectors are going to be installed to the near detector.
Super-FGD is one of them and a tracker which consists of 2 millions plastic scintillator cubes.
60 thousands wave length shifting fibers will be inserted to the cubes to lead scintillation light and it will be detected by SiPMs.
I will report the procedure to construct and install this detector.
The first step of construction is to insert fibers to the cubes.
This work should be done quickly because we have the 60 thousands fibers.
Our concern about it is that inserted fibers can be damaged by distortion of array of cubes and we have to check the quality of fibers during inserting the fibers.
I will also talk about a dedicated system for the fiber quality check.
The Telescope Array (TA) experiment, located near Delta, Utah, USA, is the largest ultra-high energy cosmic ray (UHECR) observatory in the northern hemisphere. When a UHECR primary particle arrives at the Earth, it collides with the atmosphere and produces a cascade of secondary particles known as an extensive air shower (EAS). The Telescope Array is designed to observe the EAS using a hybrid of techniques: fluorescence detectors (FDs) and surface detectors (SDs). The FDs measure the nitrogen fluorescence light emitted when the secondary particles excite the gas of the atmosphere as they pass through it. They utilize telescopes consisting of large area mirrors and photo-multiplier tube cameras. Meanwhile, the SDs use two-layer plastic scintillators to sample the density of charged particles in the showers when it reaches the Earth’s surface. Using data from both the FDs and SDs, we explore the nature and origin of UHECRs by investigating the energy spectrum, mass composition, and arrival direction distribution. In this presentation, we describe the design and technical features as well as some of the measurements of the Telescope Array detectors.
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a next-generation long baseline neutrino oscillation experiment. DUNE will make precise measurements of neutrino oscillations, which will enable a definitive determination of the neutrino mass ordering, and a high potential to discover charge-parity violation in neutrinos. DUNE will use the most intense accelerator neutrino beam and employ liquid argon TPC technology to achieve excellent resolution. Similar to all long-baseline experiments, DUNE will include a suite of near detectors (ND) located onsite at Fermilab to constrain systematic uncertainties to the few percent levels, necessary to achieve its ambitious physics goals. In this talk, I will describe the technology, design, and purpose of the DUNE ND and its impact on neutrino oscillation measurements.
The Short Baseline Near Detector (SBND), a 112-ton liquid argon time projection chamber, is the near detector of the Short Baseline Neutrino program at Fermilab. SBND has the characteristic of being remarkably close (110 m) to the neutrino source and not perfectly aligned with the neutrino beamline, in such a way that the detector is traversed by neutrinos coming from different angles with respect to the beam axis. This is known as the PRISM feature of SBND, which allows sampling of multiple neutrino fluxes using the same SBND detector. SBND-PRISM, which will start taking data in 2023, can be utilized to improve neutrino-oscillation sensitivities and study distinctive neutrino-nucleus interactions and exotic physics signals.
T2K is a long baseline neutrino experiment which exploits a neutrino and antineutrino beam at JPARC to perform precision measurements of atmospheric parameters $\Delta m^{2}_{32}$, $\sin^2(\theta_{23})$ and to provide 3$\sigma$ exclusion for some intervals of the CP-violating phase $\delta_{CP}$.
The latest results of the measurement of oscillation parameters will be presented, the main systematic uncertainties limiting the precision will be described, as well as the role of the near detector to constrain such systematic uncertainties. In particular, the latest analysis exploits a new nuclear model to describe neutrino-nucleus interactions, a new flux tuning based on an improved NA61/SHINE hadro-production measurement and new samples with proton and photon tagging at the near detector. All these novelties, designed to extract more robust constrains on the mentioned systematics uncertainties, will be described, together with the results of such improved analysis at the near detector. The future strategy to improve further the precision will be presented: the T2K beam will be upgraded with increased power and an upgrade of the ND280 near detector, located 2.5 degrees off-axis, is being assembled to exploit the increased statistics.
Neutrino oscillation physics has now entered the precision era. In parallel with needing larger detectors to collect more data, future experiments further require a significant reduction of systematic uncertainties with respect to what is currently available. In the neutrino oscillation measurements from the T2K experiment, the systematic uncertainties related to neutrino interaction cross sections are currently dominant. To reduce this uncertainty, a significantly improved understanding of neutrino-nucleus interactions is required. In particular, it is crucial to better characterise the nuclear effects which can alter the final state topology and kinematics of neutrino interactions in such a way which can bias neutrino energy reconstruction and therefore bias measurements of neutrino oscillations.
The upgraded ND280 detector will consist of a totally active Super-Fine-Grained-Detector (Super-FGD) composed of 2 million 1 cm$^3$ scintillator cubes with three 2D readouts, two High Angle TPC (HA-TPC) instrumented with resistive MicroMegas modules, and six TOF planes. It will directly confront our knowledge of neutrino interactions thanks to its full polar angle acceptance and a much lower proton tracking threshold. Furthermore, neutron tagging capabilities, in addition to precision timing information, will allow the upgraded detector to estimate neutron kinematics from neutrino interactions. Such improvements permit access to a much larger kinematic phase space which correspondingly allows techniques such as the analysis of transverse kinematic imbalances, to offer remarkable constraints of the pertinent nuclear physics for T2K analyses.
New reconstruction algorithms are being developed to fully benefit from the improved capabilities of the Super-FGD and of the HA-TPC and will be described in this talk together with the expected performances of the ND280 upgrade.
Long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments rely on detailed models of neutrino interactions on nuclei. These models constitute an important source of systematic uncertainty, partially because detectors to date have been blind to final state neutrons. Three-dimensional projection scintillator trackers comprise components of the near detector of the next generation long-baseline neutrino experiments. Due to the good timing resolution and fine granularity, this technology is capable of measuring neutrons in neutrino interactions on an event-by-event basis and will provide valuable data for refining neutrino interaction models and ways to reconstruct neutrino energy. Two prototypes have been exposed to the neutron beamline at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in both 2019 and 2020 with neutron energies between 0 and 800 MeV. In order to demonstrate the capability of neutron detection, the total neutron-scintillator cross section is measured with one of the prototypes and compared to external measurements. The total neutron cross section in scintillator between 98 and 688 MeV was measured and will be presented in this talk.
A high-energy muon collider could be the most powerful and cost-effective collider approach in the multi-TeV regime, and a neutrino source based on decay of an intense muon beam would be ideal for measurement of neutrino oscillation parameters. Muon beams may be created through the decay of pions produced in the interaction of a proton beam with a target. The muons are subsequently accelerated and injected into a storage ring where they decay producing a beam of neutrinos, or collide with counter-rotating antimuons. Cooling of the muon beam would enable more muons to be accelerated resulting in a more intense neutrino source and higher collider luminosity. Ionization cooling is the novel technique by which it is proposed to cool the beam. The Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment collaboration has constructed a section of an ionization cooling cell and used it to provide the first demonstration of ionization cooling. Here the observation of ionization cooling is described. The results of the further analysis of the data is presented, including studies in different magnet configurations and with more detailed understanding of the detector systematic uncertainty.
The Forward Physics Facility (FPF) at the LHC will detect neutrinos
produced in proton collisions. In addition to neutrinos from pion
and kaon decays, there will be significant contribution,
particularly for $\nu_e$ and $\nu_\tau$ flavors, from decay
of charmed mesons. We present our predictions for the neutrino
flux from charm decays as evaluated in different QCD approaches:
the next-to-leading order collinear factorization (NLO), and
the $k_T$-factorization approach. We use QCD parameters, such
as the scales, the choice of parton distribution functions,
and the fragmentation function, which were determined from
fitting the LHCb data for D-meson production. We also calculate
the neutrino energy distribution, for neutrinos of all flavors,
that are produced from charmed meson decays. We show that
FPF will be able to provide valuable information about the QCD,
by measuring neutrino flux. We also present our results for the
prompt neutrinos, which are decay products of charmed mesons
produced in interactions of cosmic rays with the atmosphere,
of relevance to IceCube.
The NuMI target facility at Fermilab produces an intense muon neutrino beam for NOvA (NuMI Off-axis $\nu_e$ Appearance) long baseline neutrino experiment. Three arrays of muon monitors located in the downstream of the hadron absorber in the NuMI beamline provide the measurements of the primary beam and horn current quality. We have studied the response of muon monitors with the proton beam profile changes and focusing horn current variations. The responses of muon monitors are used to develop Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. We present the progress of the ML applications and the future plans. This effort is important for many future applications such as beam quality assurance, anomaly detections, neutrino beam systematics studies and neutrino beam quality assurance. Our results demonstrate the advantages of developing useful ML applications that can be leveraged for future beamlines such as LBNF.
The hadronic vacuum polarization (HVP) is one of the main contributors to the total uncertainty in the theoretical prediction of the muon $g - 2$. The HVP term is historically obtained from a data-driven calculation based on a dispersive approach from time-like processes. To improve the theoretical prediction of HVP, in parallel to the lattice communities' effort to obtain HVP by space-like simulations, an alternative space-like data-driven approach is proposed, known as the MUonE experiment. In this talk, we first review the advantage of exploiting the space-like over the time-like processes. We present an overview of lattice calculations of the HVP term and discuss how the choice of fit functions affects the systematic error in lattice calculations and potentially the MUonE experiment. In particular, we explore Pad\'e-based fits and investigate their effects when employed on the space-like data with the precision expected from the MUonE experiment.
The MUonE experiment aims at an independent and competitive determination of the leading hadronic contribution to the muon anomalous magnetic moment $a_\mu = (g_\mu -2)/2$, based on an alternative method, complementary to the existing ones. It relies on the measurement of the shape of the $\mu e$ elastic scattering cross section, with unprecedented precision, which can be obtained at CERN by exploiting the available 160 GeV muon beam in fixed target collisions.
MUonE could have a crucial role to clarify the comparison of the $a_\mu$ measurement with the Standard Model, given the recent Fermilab result, and the tension between the accepted theory prediction and a new Lattice QCD calculation.
A Test Run with a reduced detector is planned to validate the proposal. The status of the experiment and the future plans will be presented.
First results from the Fermilab Muon $g-2$ experiment were announced in 2021. The muon’s anomalous magnetic moment $a_{\mu}$ was measured to an unprecedented $460 \text{ ppb}$ precision, and the result is in agreement with the previous Brookhaven National Lab measurement. The $4.2 \sigma$ tension between the combined experimental result and the Standard Model theoretical prediction suggests new beyond-Standard-Model physics. Analysis of Run 2 and 3 data is in progress, which is expected to reduce the experimental uncertainty by $2 \times$. Meanwhile Run 5 data collection was recently completed, reaching very close to the total goal of $20 \times$ Brookhaven statistics. In this talk I will present the Fermilab $g-2$ measurement approach and the Run 1 result, and then focus on the experiment's current status and outlook. Experiment upgrades since Run 1 have improved stability of the detector and storage ring systems, and refined characteristics of the stored muon beam. These together with specialized measurement campaigns, analysis improvements, and simulation efforts aim to reduce dominant systematic uncertainties toward the ultimate precision goal of $140 \text{ ppb}$.
We point out that the production of new bosons by charged meson decays can greatly enhance the sensitivity of beam-focused accelerator-based experiments to new physics signals. This enhancement arises since the charged mesons are focused and their three-body decays do not suffer from helicity suppression in the same way as their usual two-body decays. As a realistic application, we attempt to explain the MiniBooNE low energy excess utilizing this overlooked mechanism, uniquely realizing dark-sector interpretations as plausible solutions to the excess. For illustration purposes, we consider two well-motivated classes of dark-sector models, models of vector-portal dark matter and models of long-lived (pseudo)scalar. We argue that the model parameter values to accommodate the excess are consistent with existing limits and that they can be tested at current and future accelerator-based neutrino experiments.
The “flavor problem” represents one of the greatest challenges of particle model building since SM does not provide neither “a priori” explanation of the number of fermion generations nor on their mass and mixing patters, which appear to be very different in the lepton and quark sector. Discrete non-abelian symmetries have gathered a lot of attention as candidates for the solutions of the latter problems. In this talk, I will revise the latest results achieved by Modular Symmetries in the description of fermion masses and mixings, showing that this recently proposed framework is particularly suitable for a unified description of leptons and quarks.
We propose a new possibility of using the coherently enhanced neutrino pair emission to probe light-mediator interactions between electron and neutrinos. With typical momentum transfer at the atomic $\mathcal O(1$\,eV) scale, this process is extremely sensitive for the mediator mass range $\mathcal O(10^{-3} \sim 10^4$)\,eV. The sensitivity on the product of couplings with electron ($g^e$ or $y^e$) and neutrinos ($g^\nu$ or $y^\nu$) can touch down to $|y^e y^\nu| < 10^{-9} \sim 10^{-19}$ for a scalar mediator and $|g^e g^\nu| < 10^{-15} \sim 10^{-26}$ for a vector one, with orders of improvement from the existing constraints.
For over a decade, the LGBTQ+ CERN group has pushed to make CERN a better place for LGBTQ+ people. We interact with CERN management on issues of importance to our community, work to create a welcoming environment for LGBTQ+ people at CERN, make connections with other LGBTQ+ organizations in Geneva, and reach out to the broader CERN community. In this talk, I will discuss what we have accomplished and learned so far and how you can be a good ally to everybody in the LGBTQ+ community.
The Women in Technology community at CERN (WIT), currently comprising over 500 members, was born in early 2016 with the main aim to create a supportive network for exchanging experiences and career advice among women working at CERN.
This is done through diverse activities, such as:
• interviews featuring senior women scientists,
• social events such as movie screenings and laboratory visits,
• outreach lectures and events,
• social media campaigns,
• yearly mentoring program.
The WIT mentoring program facilitates one-to-one mentoring relationships that connect mentees with more senior colleagues at CERN (and CERN alumni), with the goal to foster professional learning and personal development and facilitate meaningful connections.
The program, which is running its fifth edition this year, is open to everyone at CERN regardless of gender, background or experience and has grown from 11 to 32 mentor-mentee pairs since its start.
This contribution describes how the WIT mentoring program is structured, what were the key pillars when starting the initiative and the ways of scaling it in the last years. It also highlights how this program benefits mentees and mentors alike as well as its potential to support the Organization.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are hot topics across all STEM fields. As we collectively work to address DEI concerns in our departments, institutions, and professions, what are tools and strategies we can use to intentionally center equity in our teaching, research, and work? This session will set a foundation of how identity-based inequities manifest in physics & STEM education, on which a dialogue exploring strategies to actively center identity and equity can be built.
Hyper-Kamiokande (Hyper-K) is the next generation water-Cherenkov neutrino experiment, building on the success of its predecessor Super-Kamiokande. To match the increased precision and reduced statistical errors of the new detectors, improvements to event reconstruction and event selection are required to suppress backgrounds and minimise systematic errors. Machine learning has the potential to provide these enhancements, enabling the precision measurements that Hyper-K is aiming to perform. This talk provides an overview of the areas where machine learning is being explored for Hyper-K's water Cherenkov detectors. Results using various network architectures are presented, along with comparisons to traditional methods and discussion of the challenges and future plans for applying machine learning techniques.
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a Cherenkov detector deployed over a cubic kilometer deep within the South Pole ice. The DeepCore subdetector is built in the lower center of the array and more densely configured, improving the reconstruction performance of neutrinos at the GeV-scale, where atmospheric neutrino oscillations can be studied. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are used to reconstruct neutrino interactions in and near the DeepCore detector, which achieve comparable direction and energy resolution to current Likelihood-based methods but with 3 orders of magnitude faster execution speeds. In this talk, I will present an ongoing study of atmospheric muon neutrino disappearance, which is established on the new reconstructions using CNNs, and compare it to the recent IceCube results.
Super-Kamiokande has observed boron-8 solar neutrino recoil electrons at kinetic energies as low as 3.49 MeV to study neutrino flavor conversion within the sun. At SK-observable energies, these conversions are dominated by the Mikheyev–Smirnov–Wolfenstein effect. An upturn in the electron survival probability in which vacuum neutrino oscillations become dominant is predicted to occur at lower energies, but radioactive background increases exponentially with decreasing energy. New machine learning approaches provide substantial background reduction in the 2.49 MeV - 3.49 MeV energy region such that statistical extraction of solar neutrino interactions becomes feasible. An overview of machine learning methods in use for water Cherenkov detectors including convolutional neural networks trained on event display images and boosted decision trees trained on reconstructed variables will be presented followed by solar angle distributions of events selected for this analysis.
The ProtoDUNE-SP Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber is the prototype for the first far detector module of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). Convolutional Neural Networks have been developed and employed in the analysis of scientific data from ProtoDUNE, which exploits the high-resolution images and the fine details that the detector can capture. Despite these advantages, the classification of the different types of particles and interactions is still a challenge. With this motivation. In this talk, I will present the details and the application of a multi-task reconstruction algorithm using Sparse Convolutional Neural Networks for the task of panoptic segmentation, which simultaneously generates a voxel-by-voxel particle ID and clusters voxels into objects.
We report on a phenomenological analysis of all available electron scattering data on carbon (about 8000 differential cross section measurements) and oxygen at all values of q. The QE cross section is modeled within the framework of the superscaling model (including Pauli blocking). In addition to the expected enhancement of the transverse QE response function we find that at low values of q there is "Extra Suppression" of the QE longitudinal response function beyond the expected suppression from Pauli blocking. We extract q dependent parameterizations that can be used to determine the "Extra Suppression" factor for any nucleon momentum distribution for use in electron and neutrino Monte Carlo generators. We obtain the best measurement of the Coulomb Sum Rule (CSR) as function of q. For carbon, the CSR and low q suppression are in good agreement with the Lavato 2000 "First Principle" Green's Function MC. The extracted CSR and low q suppression values for Carbon are in good agreement with the “first principle Green’s function MC” calculation of Lavato et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 082501 (2016). The extracted CSR values for Oxygen are in agreement with the Coupled Custer calculation of J. E. Sobczyk et al. .Phys. ReV. C 102, 064312 (2020). The contribution of nuclear excitations to the Coulomb Sum Rule is significant (up to 29%). Consequently we also provide parameterizations of the form factors for the nuclear excitations in carbon$ and oxygen}
MicroBooNE data of charged current inclusive neutrino cross sections on argon as a function of different kinematical variables have recently appeared. We compare these data to our theoretical calculations after a brief review of our RPA model and of its successful predictions for the MiniBooNE and T2K cross sections on carbon. Overall we find an agreement with MicroBooNE data in spite of a tendency of underestimation in some specific regions. We also quantitatively compare our model to the ones employed in the MicroBooNE analyses. A new aspect is the availability of the data in terms of the energy transfer to the nucleus, which allows a better separation of the different reaction mechanisms. We focus especially on the results in terms of this transferred energy, for which our model is particularly efficient. We finally discuss the semi-inclusive CC0$\pi$1p and CC0$\pi$Np MicroBooNE results and the compatibility of our multinucleon emission channel with these data.
The description of final-state interactions (FSI) in the large phase space probed in neutrino experiments poses a great challenge. In neutrino experiments, which operate under semi-inclusive conditions, cascade models are commonly used for this task, while under exclusive conditions FSI can be treated with relativistic optical potentials (ROP). We formulate conditions under which the ROP approach and cascade model can be directly compared. We feed the NEUT cascade with events from a relativistic distorted-wave impulse approximation calculation that uses the real part of an optical potential. Cuts on the missing energy of the resulting events are applied to define a set of events that can be directly compared to RDWIA calculations with the full optical potential. The NEUT cascade and ROP agree for proton kinetic energies Tp>150 MeV for carbon, oxygen and calcium nuclei when a realistic nuclear density is used to introduce events in the cascade. For Tp<100 MeV the ROP and NEUT cross sections differ in shape and differences in magnitude are larger than 50 \%. Single transverse variables allow to distinguish different approaches to FSI, but due to a large non-QE contribution the comparison to T2K data does not give an unambiguous view of FSI. We discuss electron scattering and argue that with a cut in missing energy FSI can be studied with minimal confounding factors in e.g. e4ν. The agreement of the ROP and NEUT for T2K conditions lends confidence to these models as a tool in oscillation analyses for sufficiently large nucleon kinetic energies. These results urge for caution when a cascade model is applied for small nucleon energies. The assessment of model assumptions relevant to this region are strongly encouraged. This paper provides novel constraints on cascade models from proton-nucleus scattering that can be easily applied to other neutrino event generators.
Nuclear effects in neutrino-nucleus scattering are one of the main sources of uncertainty in the analysis of neutrino oscillation experiments. Due to the extended neutrino energy distribution (flux), very different reaction mechanisms contribute to the cross section at the same time. Measurements of muon momentum in CC0$\pi$ events are very important for experiments like T2K, where most of the information about the oscillation signal comes from detection of the final-state muons only. However, those inclusive measurements make difficult to distinguish the contributions of nuclear effects. For instance, they do not allow to separate between different nuclear models and are not sufficient to put constraints on the amount of two-body current contributions. This is the reason why there is a growing interest in measurements of more exclusive processes, for instance the detection in coincidence of a muon and an ejected proton in the final state. Interpretation of such reactions, usually called semi-inclusive reactions, is challenging as it requires realistic models of the initial nuclear state and an appropriate description of proton final-state interactions (FSI). In this talk we're going to present the theoretical predictions of semi-inclusive $\nu_\mu$-$^{12}$C obtained within an unfactorized approach based on the relativistic distorted wave impulse approximation (RDWIA) and compare them with T2K and MINERvA measurements and predictions of the inclusive SuSAv2-MEC model implemented in the neutrino event generator GENIE.
As the J-PARC Main Ring accelerator undergoes upgrades to 1.3 MW, upgrades to proton beam monitors in the neutrino extraction beamline are also underway. These upgrades will allow for stable running of the beamline for the current T2K and future Hyper-K long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments. Important upgrades include those towards improving monitor radiation hardness and minimizing induced beam losses, as well as those towards quick handling and remote exchange of spent monitors.
With the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment decommissioned, muon and hadron monitors became an important diagnostic tool for the NuMI Off-axis $\nu_e$ Appearance (NOvA) experiment at Fermilab to monitor the Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) beam. The goal of this study is to maintain the quality of the monitor signals and to establish correlations with the neutrino beam profile. And with the muon monitor simulation, we carry out a systematic study of the response of the muon monitors to the changes in the parameters of the proton beam and lattice parameters. By combining individual pixel information from muon monitors and pattern recognition algorithms, we use simulation resluts and measurement data to build a machine learning-based predictions of the muon monitor response and neutrino flux.
The T2K experiment is a neutrino oscillation experiment running at J-PARC. In order to increase the statistics of neutrino data and improve the sensitivity to CP violation, upgrade of the neutrino beam is currently ongoing. The repetition cycle will be shortened from 2.48s to 1.16s and the number of protons in each pulse will be increased. With these upgrades, the beam intensity will be increased from 510 kW to 1.3MW. In the T2K experiment, the beam direction and profile are monitored by detecting muons produced simultaneously with neutrinos. Si PIN photodiodes and ionization chambers have been used as muon monitors, but these monitors need to be updated after the beam upgrade due to radiation damage or non-linearity at high intensity. Therefore, we are studying Electron Multiplier Tube (EMT) as a new detector candidate. It was shown by the previous study that EMTs have superior radiation tolerance than Si detectors. However, it was also shown that the gain drops for initial radiation and then further decreases after certain amount of radiation, corresponds to more than 100 days of 1.3 MW beam exposure. In order to improve the radiation tolerance of EMT, further studies are ongoing to address initial instability and to extend the life of the EMT. For these purposes, beam tests were conducted at ELPH in Tohoku University. In this beam test, the variation of the gain was confirmed with further radiation and the cause of the variation was investigated by changing the conditions of radiation for each component. Another study indicates the cause of the initial instability is due to the temperature dependence. We report the results of these studies.
The NA62 experiment at CERN collected world's largest dataset of charged kaon decays in 2016-2018, leading to the first observation of the ultra-rare K+ --> pi+ nu nu decay based on 20 candidates. Dedicated trigger lines were employed for collection of di-lepton final states, which allowed establishing stringent upper limits on the rates lepton flavor and lepton number violating kaon decays. The dataset is also exploited to search for production of light feebly interacting particles (such as heavy neutral leptons) in kaon decays. Recent NA62 results based on the 2016-2018 dataset, and the prospects of the NA62 experiment, are presented.
The growing evidence of lepton-flavour-universality violation in B-meson decays is one of the most interesting hints for physics beyond the Standard Model that may be reachable at the Large Hadron Collider. In addition, the observation of lepton flavor violation (LVF) would be a smoking gun for the presence of physics beyond the Standard Model Consequently, a broad program of measurements and direct searches that test lepton-flavor universality and lepton-flavour violation in proton-proton collisions is underway at the ATLAS experiment. This talk will present the latest results using the full Run 2 dataset at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, as well as discuss future prospects.
The Belle II experiment at the SuperKEKB energy-asymmetric e+e− collider is a substantial upgrade of the B factory facility at the Japanese KEK laboratory. The design luminosity of the machine is 6×1035 cm−2s−1 and the Belle II experiment aims to ultimately record 50 ab−1 of data, a factor of 50 more than its predecessor. With this data set, Belle II will be able to measure the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix, the matrix elements and their phases, with unprecedented precision and explore flavor physics with B and charmed mesons, and τ leptons. Belle II has also a unique capability to search for low mass dark matter and low mass mediators. In this presentation, we will review the latest results from Belle II, with emphasis on those related to lepton flavour violation.
Tests of lepton flavour universality are particularly sensitive to the presence of physics beyond the Standard Model. Recent results and future prospects with semileptonic and rare heavy flavour decays at the LHCb experiment are presented.
I discuss predictions for signals of some dark sector models at the Fermilab Short Baseline Neutrino (SBN) experiments. I consider prospects for both inelastic dark matter models and Higgs portal mediator models. I demonstrate that new parameter space for both models can be probed in the near future. I discuss new simulation and analysis strategies, the latter including machine learning techniques, that will be required to realize such searches.
Lorentz violation and non-standard interactions are two of the most popular scenarios beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, both of which can affect neutrino oscillations significantly. However, these effects can mimic each other, and it would be difficult to distinguish between them in any fixed-baseline neutrino experiment. We show that atmospheric neutrinos, having access to a wide range of baselines, can break this degeneracy. Observations of core-passing atmospheric neutrinos and antineutrinos would be a potent tool to discriminate between these two new-physics scenarios.
ArgoNeuT was a 0.24 ton Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber detector at Fermilab running from 2009 to 2010. It was located along the NuMI neutrino beam and collected six months of data in anti-neutrino beam mode. ArgoNeuT’s data-set has been used to perform numerous first neutrino cross-section measurements on argon. It can also be used to probe physics beyond the standard model resulting from high-energy proton fixed-target collisions in the NuMI beam. Searches for two such models have been performed using the ArgoNeuT experiment: Heavy Neutral Leptons produced via decays of tau leptons, and Heavy QCD Axions produced via mixing with standard model mesons. The resulting particles can then propagate along the NuMI beamline and then decay producing a di-muon signature observable in ArgoNeuT. This talk will present the results of these searches, along with the new constraints that can be applied on the Heavy Neutral Lepton and Heavy QCD Axion parameter spaces.
The discovery of the phenomena of neutrino oscillations have opened a new window to probe physics beyond Standard Model (SM). In this precision era of neutrino physics, experiments around the world are trying to measure the oscillations parameters with ever increasing accuracy. This makes the ongoing and proposed neutrino experiments sensitive to the subdominant effects of neutrinos like Non Standard Interactions (NSIs).The NSIs [1,2] often comes in various extensions of SM and can significantly impact the sensitivities of different neutrino experiments. In this work we have explored a new type of NSI which is mediated by a scalar termed as scalar NSI [3,4]. The effect of this kind of coupling appears as a medium dependent perturbation to the neutrino mass term, which makes it interesting to probe. Also the effect of scalar NSI scales linearly with matter density and hence it makes LBL experiments one of the suitable candidate to study its effects.
In this study, we have explored the effects of scalar NSI on the sensitivities of various Long Baseline experiments viz. DUNE [5], T2HK [6] and T2HKK [7]. We found that, the presence of scalar NSI poses various degeneracy is measurement of the δ CP phase apart from having significant impact on the oscillation probabilities. We have also performed a sensitivity analysis of these experiments towards finding these scalar NSI elements. Finally we have checked the effect of scalar NSI on the CPV sensitivity at these experiments.
We present compact analytic expressions for neutrino propagation probabilities in matter, with invisible neutrino decay effects included. These will be directly relevant for long-baseline and reactor experiments.
The inclusion of decay leads to a non-Hermitian effective Hamiltonian, with the Hermitian component corresponding to oscillation, and the anti-Hermitian component representing the invisible decay effects. Due to a possible mismatch between the effective mass eigenstates and the decay eigenstates of neutrinos, these two components need not commute. Even for the special case where the decay and mass eigenstates in vacuum are the same, in the presence of matter, the two components will invariably become non-commuting. We overcome this by employing the techniques of inverse Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff (BCH) expansion, and the Cayley-Hamilton theorem applied in the 3-flavor framework. We also point out the conditions under which the One Mass Scale Dominance (OMSD) would be a good approximation.
The analytic results obtained provide physical understanding into possible effects of neutrino decay as it propagates through Earth matter. We show that certain non-intuitive feature like decay increasing the value of $P_{\mu\mu}$ at its first and second dip may be explained using our analytic approximations.
The cubic-kilometre neutrino telescope (KM3NeT) is a deep-sea infrastructure composed of two neutrino telescopes, consisting of large-scale 3D-arrays of photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) currently under construction on the Mediterranean seabed. The two telescopes are: ARCA, near Sicily in Italy, designed for neutrino astronomy and ORCA, near Toulon in France, designed for neutrino oscillations.
The ORCA telescope, having a neutrino energy threshold in the GeV range, has the measurement of the neutrino mass ordering and atmospheric neutrino oscillation parameters as its main research goal. We intend to discuss the accurate calibration procedures performed necessary to achieve these purposes.
Kaon Decay-At-Rest (KDAR) provides a neutrino signal with well-known neutrino energy, which is an important probe for measuring the neutrino cross-section in an energy range that is otherwise difficult to access experimentally. The J-PARC Sterile Neutrino Search at the J-PARC Spallation Neutron Source (JSNS2) experiment is in a unique place for measuring monoenergetic neutrinos at 236 MeV from charged Kaon decay-at-rest (KDAR). JSNS2 is located at the J-PARC's Material and Life Science Facility (MLF) where the world’s most intense source of KDAR was created by a 3 GeV proton beam incident on a liquid mercury target. In this presentation, We will present the first result of the search for the KDAR neutrinos conducted with the JSNS2 experiment with the data during the JSNS2's first long-term physics run in 2021, consisting of more than 115 days of data and 1.45x10^22 POT.
We present a global analysis of neutrino DIS cross-sections in the framework of nuclear parton distribution functions (PDFs). In our previous analysis (circa 2011), we concluded that some neutrino DIS data, particularly from the NuTeV experiment, were incompatible with the remaining nuclear scattering data. We have now performed a follow-up analysis that improves the previous study in many respects. For example, we have included all available neutrino DIS cross-section data from CDHSW, CCFR, NuTeV, and Chorus experiments alongside the di-muon semi-inclusive data. We have also improved the treatment of correlated systematic errors, and above all, we have included numerous important updates to the nuclear parton distribution functions accumulated across the past 10 years. In this contribution, we discuss the new updated global analysis of nuclear PDFs, including the neutrino data, and examine the tensions between different data sets encountered in the course of the global analysis. Understanding the tensions between the neutrino and charged-lepton DIS data is essential not only for a better flavor separation in global analyses of nuclear and proton PDFs, but also for neutrino physics and the searches for physics beyond the Standard Model.
Accurate neutrino cross-section measurements are required for precise measurements of neutrino oscillation physics such as CP-violation and the ordering of the neutrino masses. In this talk, I will give an overview of neutrino cross section measurements with NuMI neutrino beam, specifically neutrino cross sections from MINERvA experiment and prospects of neutrino-Argon cross-section measurements at ICARUS. MINERvA is located on axis and ICARUS, located on-axis in the SBN neutrino beam, is 103 mrad off-axis from the NuMI beam. The interactions at both experiments provide the basis for important neutrino cross-section measurements and tests of models in an energy range that overlaps both the SBN oscillation search and most of the DUNE spectrum.
The GENIE neutrino event generator seeks to be a universal tool for simulating neutrino-nucleus scattering across the wide energy range of interest for current and future experiments. The international GENIE Collaboration maintains and continues to develop its software suite to meet the interaction modeling needs of a broad user community. Recent improvements to GENIE include implementation of new theoretical calculations across several processes of interest, model parameter tuning to neutrino cross-section data, and extensions to the technical infrastructure needed for the successful execution of experimental analyses. This talk presents selected highlights from these ongoing developments in GENIE.
The European Spallation Source (ESS) will be the most powerful neutron source in the world. This facility offers a unique opportunity for studying fundamental physics, in particular the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe thanks to the development of a very intense neutrino superbeam. The ESS neutrino Super-Beam project proposes an accelerator complex, complimentary to the existing facility, and an additional target station to produce such a neutrino beam. We will give an overview of the ESSnuSB project with details on the accelerator complex, from source to target. We will also present the proposed next steps for the ESSnuSB project.
A high-power target system is a key beam element to complete future High Energy Physics (HEP) experiments but in the recent past, major accelerator facilities have been limited in beam power not by their accelerators, but by the beam intercepting device survivability. The target must then endure high power pulsed beam, leading to high cycle thermal stresses/pressures and thermal shocks. The increased beam power will also create significant challenges such as corrosion and radiation damage that can cause harmful effects on the material and degrade their mechanical and thermal properties during irradiation. This can eventually lead to the failure of the material and drastically reduce the lifetime of targets and beam intercepting devices.
The Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF), under design at FNAL, plans to use Graphite for the production target, Titanium alloy as the target beam window and Be as the primary beam window. However, relatively little is known about the behavior of such materials when impacted by high energy proton beam and very limited engineering data is available to support the design and material choice for bam intercepting devices
In order to operate reliable beam-intercepting devices in the framework of energy and intensity increase projects of the future, it is essential to develop a strong R&D for robust target and beam window. The international RaDIATE collaboration, established in 2012, connects expertise in nuclear material and accelerate targets to generate useful materials data for application within the accelerator and fission/fusion communities.
After presenting the high power targetry challenges facing next generation multi-MW accelerators, I will give an overview of the most recent recent activities within the frame work of the RaDIATE collaboration in support of High Power Targetry development.
MELODY at the China Neutron Spallation Source (CSNS) is the first muon beam that will be built in China for muon science. It will take part at the second phase of CSNS (II) and utilize 20 kW out of 500 kW of the proton beam at CSNS. Since 2021, the various components of the muon beam are under design. In this talk, a brief introduction of the overall design of MELODY at the high energy proton area (HEPEA) will be given, focusing on the primary proton target station and the muon beamlines.
Muon to electron conversion in a muonic atom is an excellent laboratory to search for
charged lepton flavor violation (CLFV). Its discovery would be a clear signal of physics beyond the
Standard Model (BSM). In order to further improve the experiments by an additional factor of 100 in sensitivity beyond the current generation ones and study
potential signals, the use of a Fixed-Field Alternating gradient (FFA) ring has been proposed to
create a Phase Rotated Intense Source of Muons (PRISM). PRISM will allow
significant purification of the muon beam and suppression of a typically large momentum spread
by the use of RF phase rotation in the ring, both reducing the backgrounds and increasing the
number of stopped muons relative to other methods. PRISM requires a proton driver capable of
producing short, intense proton bunches. New facilities, in particular PIP-II at Fermilab equipped
with a dedicated accumulator ring, or upgrades of other accelerator facilities, such as J-PARC and
ESS, offer promising opportunities for providing the required intensity and time structure of the
proton beam. A new proposed complex at Fermilab, the Advanced Muon Facility, would use the PRISM concept to provide the world's most intense positive and negative muon beams by exploiting the full potential of PIP-II and the Booster upgrade. Progress in R&D studies on PRISM are discussed.
We propose an evolution of the Mu2e experiment, called Mu2e-II, that would leverage advances in detector technology and utilize the increased proton intensity provided by the Fermilab PIP-II upgrade to improve the sensitivity for neutrinoless muon-to-electron conversion by one order of magnitude beyond the Mu2e experiment, providing the deepest probe of charged lepton flavor violation in the foreseeable future. Mu2e-II will use as much of the Mu2e infrastructure as possible, providing, where required, improvements to the Mu2e apparatus to accommodate the increased beam intensity and cope with the accompanying increase in backgrounds.
The constituents of dark matter are still unknown, and the viable possibilities span a very large mass range. The scenario where dark matter originates from thermal contact with familiar matter in the early Universe requires the DM mass to lie within about an MeV to 100 TeV. Considerable experimental attention has been given to exploring Weakly Interacting Massive Particles in the upper end of this range (few GeV – ~TeV), while the region ~MeV to ~GeV is largely unexplored. If there is an interaction between light DM and ordinary matter, as there must be in the case of a thermal origin, then there necessarily is a production mechanism in accelerator-based experiments. The Light Dark Matter eXperiment (LDMX) is a planned electron-beam fixed-target missing-momentum experiment that has unique sensitivity to light DM in the sub-GeV range. Relevant to the NuFact muon working group is a proposal for a muon LDMX that would use a muon beam to probe the electron-phobic scenario. This contribution will give an overview of the theoretical motivation, the main experimental challenges and how they are addressed, the status of the LDMX experiment, as well as projected sensitivities in comparison to other experiments.
The recent evidence for coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CE\nuνNS) in the NCC-1701 germanium detector using antineutrinos from the Dresden-II nuclear reactor is in good agreement with standard model expectations. However, we show that a 2σ improvement in the fit to the data can be achieved if the quenching factor is described by a modified Lindhard model with a negative value of $q$, which is also consistent with the direct quenching factor measurements. We also place constraints on the parameter space of a light vector or scalar mediator that couples to neutrinos and quarks, and on a neutrino magnetic moment. We demonstrate that the constraints are quite sensitive to the quenching factor at low recoil energies by comparing constraints for the standard Lindhard model with those by marginalizing over the two parameters of the modified Lindhard model.
The information about the Earth's interior structure comes from seismic studies and gravitational measurements. The Preliminary Reference Earth Model (PREM) of the density of the Earth is obtained by measuring the travel time of seismic waves. Here, the density distribution inside the Earth is estimated from the model-dependent empirical relations having assumptions based on temperature, pressure, composition, and elastic properties of the Earth, which give rise to uncertainties in the PREM profile.
Neutrinos may be used in a way complementary to seismic studies and gravitational measurements, thus starting an era of “multimessenger tomography” of Earth. Since neutrinos can peek into the deepest layers of Earth with their weak interactions, they can be used to sense the amount of baryonic matter present inside the core. If the baryonic matter observed by neutrinos is found to be less than the expected mass from gravitational measurement, we can attribute the difference to the presence of dark matter inside the core. Atmospheric neutrinos offer the possibility of probing dark matter inside the core of the Earth in a unique way through Earth matter effects in neutrino oscillations. We demonstrate that while the dark matter profile will be hard to identify, the baryonic matter profile inside the core can be probed in a manner complementary to the seismic measurements.
The nature of neutrinos, whether they are Dirac or Majorana particles, has been an open question for long time. In the case of two flavour mixing, the transition matrix is real in the case of Dirac neutrinos but it contains a phase $\phi$ in the case of Majorana neutrinos. This phase does not appear in neutrino oscillation probabilities for vacuum oscillations as well as for matter modified oscillations. However, it was shown by Benatti et al. 2001, that for some special forms of quantum decoherence effects in neutrino evolution, this $\phi$-phase appears in oscillation probabilities. In this work, we ask the question: For what other forms of neutrino evolution equation does the Majorana phase appear in the oscillation probabilities? We show that, in the case of neutrino decay, the Majorana phase appears in the oscillation probabilities if the decay eigenstates are not the same as the mass eigenstates. The forms of appearance of Majorana phase in our work and that in [Benatti et al. 2001] can be distinguished from each other by their $CPT$ properties.
We propose a new approach to explore the neutral-current non-standard neutrino interactions (NSI) in atmospheric neutrino experiments using oscillation dips and valleys in reconstructed muon observables, at a detector like ICAL that can identify the muon charge. We focus on the flavor-changing NSI parameter $\varepsilon_{\mu\tau}$, which has the maximum impact on the muon survival probability in these experiments. We show that non-zero $\varepsilon_{\mu\tau}$ shifts the oscillation dip locations in $L/E$ distributions of the up/down event ratios of reconstructed $\mu^-$ and $\mu^+$ in opposite directions. We introduce a new variable $\Delta d$ representing the difference of dip locations in $\mu^-$ and $\mu^+$, which is sensitive to the magnitude as well as the sign of $\varepsilon_{\mu\tau}$, and is independent of the value of $\Delta m^2_{32}$. We further note that the oscillation valley in the ($E$, $\cos \theta$) plane of the reconstructed muon observables bends in the presence of NSI, its curvature having opposite signs for $\mu^-$ and $\mu^+$. We demonstrate the identification of NSI with this curvature, which is feasible for detectors like ICAL having excellent muon energy and direction resolutions. We illustrate how the measurement of contrast in the curvatures of valleys in $\mu^-$ and $\mu^+$ can be used to estimate $\varepsilon_{\mu\tau}$. Using these proposed oscillation dip and valley measurements, the achievable precision on $|\varepsilon_{\mu\tau}|$ at 90% C.L. is about 2% with 500 kt$\cdot$yr exposure. The effects of statistical fluctuations, systematic errors, and uncertainties in oscillation parameters have been incorporated using multiple sets of simulated data. Our method would provide a direct and robust measurement of $\varepsilon_{\mu\tau}$ in the multi-GeV energy range.
The clockwork mechanism generates small neutrino masses which includes Dirac mass terms as well as Majorana mass terms for the new fermions with exponentially
suppressed interactions in theories which contain no small parameters at the fundamental
level. We work on a general description of the clockwork mechanism valid for
fermions. This mechanism can be implemented with a discrete
set of new fields or, in its continuum version, through an extra spatial dimension. We derive analytic formulas for the masses of the new particles and for their Yukawa couplings to the lepton doublets, in the scenario where the clockwork parameters are universal. When the Majorana masses all vanish, the zero mode of the clockwork sector forms a Dirac pair with the active neutrino, with a mass which is in agreement with oscillations experiments for a sufficiently large number of clockwork gears. On the other hand, when the Majorana masses do not vanish, neutrino masses are generated via the seesaw mechanism. In this case, and due to the fact that the effective Yukawa couplings of the higher modes can be sizable, neutrino masses can only be suppressed by postulating a large Majorana mass for all the gears. Finally, we discuss the constraints on the mass scale of the clockwork fermions from the non-observation of the rare leptonic decay µ → eγ.
The DUNE experiment is a future long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment aiming at measuring the neutrino CP violation and establishing the neutrino mass hierarchy, as well as at a rich physics programme from supernovae over low-energy physics to beyond standard model searches.
The baseline technology for the first far detector is a proven single-phase horizontal drift liquid Argon TPC based on standard wire-chamber technology.
For the second far detector, a new technology, the so-called "vertical drift" TPC is currently being developed: It aims at combining the strengths of the two technologies tested in the ProtoDUNE cryostats at the CERN neutrino platform into a single design, a vertical-drift single-phase liquid Argon TPC using a novel perforated-PCB anode design. This design maintains excellent tracking and calorimetry performance while significantly simplifying the complexity of the TPC construction.
This talk will introduce the concept of the vertical drift TPC, present first results from small-scale prototypes and a first full-scale anode module, as well as outlining the plans for future prototypes and the next steps towards the full second DUNE far detector.
Photon detection systems (PDS) are an integral part of liquid-argon neutrino detectors. Besides providing the timing information for an event, which is necessary for reconstructing the drift coordinate of ionizing particle tracks, photon detectors can be effectively used for other purposes including triggering events, background rejection, and calorimetric energy estimation. PDS in particular for the DUNE Far Detector Module 2 is designed to achieve a more extended optical coverage (—> ~4π) with new generation large size PD modules based on the ARAPUCA technology. This will provide enhanced opportunities for the study of low energy neutrino physics using PDS. The ARAPUCA technology was extensively tested within the ProtoDUNE-SP detector operated at the CERN neutrino platform. Here I present a study of the timing resolution of ARAPUCA detectors using light emitted from a sample of energetic cosmic ray muons traveling parallel to the PDS. An intrinsic timing resolution of the order of 3 ns is observed for the ARAPUCA detectors. An excellent timing resolution capability of PDS can be exploited for further enhancing physics study in the DUNE far detectors.
We present a brief description of the Short-Baseline Near Detector (SBND) hardware trigger
system. The SBND experiment is a liquid argon neutrino detector that sits on the central axis of
the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB), located at Fermilab. The detector is currently being assembled
and is expected to start operating in 2023. Neutrinos delivered by the BNB will interact with liquid
argon inside the SBND, producing charge and scintillation light that will be collected, respectively,
by the charge collection wires and the photon detection system. SBND will record over a million
neutrino interaction events per year while simultaneously being exposed to a large flux of cosmic
ray interactions. Thus it is imperative to determine which events in the detector are of interest
for analysis. This is the work of the SBND trigger system which receives several prompt inputs,
discriminates these inputs and qualifies them to form a so-called “trigger decision”. In this work,
we will focus on the general overview of the trigger system for SBND and, specifically, we describe
the configuration of the Analog Master Trigger Card used in the photon detection trigger.
Optical readout of large scale dual-phase liquid Argon TPCs is an attractive and cost effective
alternative to charge readout. Following the successful demonstration of 3D optical readout with the ARIADNE 1-ton detector, the ARIADNE+ experiment was recently deployed using the protoDUNE “cold box” at the CERN neutrino platform imaging a much larger active region of
2m x 2m. ARIADNE+ uses 4 Timepix3 cameras imaging the S2 light produced by 16 novel, patent pending, glass THGEMs. ARIADNE+ takes advantage of the raw Timepix3 data coming natively 3D and zero suppressed with a 1.6 ns timing resolution. Three of the four THGEM quadrants were visible readout with the fourth featuring a VUV light image intensifier, thus removing the need for
wavelength shifting altogether. Cosmic muon events were recorded successfully at stable conditions providing the first demonstration for its use in kton scale experiments such as DUNE.
In my talk I will be discussing in detail the innovative ideas that make ARIADNE+ unique and the benefits that come with these technologies. These include, but is not limited too, TPX3Cams, the PEN wavelength shifting, a chemically etched stainless steel extraction grid, Invar support structure and a new way to manufacture glass THGEMs. I will also be presenting a gallery of
cosmic muon events along with a breakdown of our mechanisms for analysis allowing us to arrive at an energy calibration and resolution.
10x3min presentations by selected posters
The muon anomalous magnetic moment (g-2) measurement by the Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL-E989) is consistent with a previous experiment by the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL-E821), with a deviation from the SM prediction of 4.2 standard deviations. This discrepancy could lead to the discovery of unknown particles, and a completely different approach from previous experiments is needed for further verification. The J-PARC experiment aims to measure muon g-2 and the electric dipole moment (EDM) with high precision using a new method with a low-emittance muon beam generated by RF linear acceleration. This paper describes the development of the world's first linear accelerator dedicated to muons.
The muon collider is an excellent prospect as a multi-TeV lepton collider, with the possibility for high luminosity and reach to 10 TeV or more. In order to realise such luminosity, high beam brightness is required. Ionisation cooling, which was demonstrated recently by the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE), is the technique proposed to realise sufficient brightness. MICE demonstrated transverse emittance reduction of incident beams having relatively high emittance and without beam reacceleration. The international Muon Collider Collaboration proposes a Demonstrator for Muon Cooling that will demonstrate six-dimensional emittance reduction over a number of cooling cells, operating at beam emittance close to the ultimate goal for the muon collider. Together with a full R&D programme this will pave the way for construction of a muon collider. In this paper, initial considerations and possible implementations for the demonstrator are discussed.
The Fermilab Muon Campus, repurposed Tevatron-era Antiproton Source facilities, is currently the home to the g-2 and Mu2e muon experiments. Collecting data since 2017, the g-2 experiment is currently running and will switch to a mu-minus mode before the Muon Campus transitions to Mu2e operation. Currently in the commissioning process, the Mu2e experiment is expected to begin calibration and data collection in fiscal year 2024. A majority of the Muon Campus is shared between the two experiments, however the modes of operation for each are significantly different. An 8 GeV primary proton beam strikes a target to produce a 3.1 GeV/c secondary muon beam for g-2, while the Mu2e experiment uses the Delivery Ring, formerly the Antiproton Accumulator Ring, for a pulsed, resonantly extracted, 8 kW, 8 GeV proton beam incident on a target in the experiment's target hall to produce a muon beam for the experiment. The current state of the Muon Campus, the current and future plans of the g-2 and Mu2e experiments, including the transition between operating modes, and the challenges associated with Mu2e operation will be presented.
Mu2e-II will probe new physics mass scales up to 105 TeV by utilizing an 800-MeV 100-kW proton beam with an upgraded Mu2e beamline and detector, to obtain a sensitivity of ~10-17 in measurements of mu to electron conversion. This sensitivity is enabled by the PIP-II SRF Linac, which can accelerate a 2-mA proton beam to a kinetic energy of 800 MeV (1.6 MW of beam power); Mu2e-II will use a fraction of that potential. The higher beam intensity will require a substantially more advanced target design. In this talk, we will discuss our recent advances in design R&D for a Mu2e-II target station, based on energy deposition and radiation damage simulations (using MARS15, G4beamline, and FLUKA), as well as thermal and mechanical ANSYS analyses to estimate the survivability of the system. We considered rotated targets, fixed granular targets and a novel conveyor target with tungsten or carbon spherical elements that are circulated through the beam path. The motion of the spheres can be ensured either mechanically or both mechanically and by a He-gas flow. The simulations identified the conveyor target as the preferred approach, and that approach has been developed into a prototype. We describe this first prototype for the Mu2e-II target and report on its mechanical tests performed at Fermilab that indicate the feasibility of the design, discuss its weaknesses as well as suggested the directions of its further improvement.
KM3NeT/ORCA is an underwater neutrino telescope which is currently being deployed in the Mediterranean Sea. Its geometry has been optimized for the study of neutrino oscillations using atmospheric neutrinos. In particular this will allow to measure the neutrino mass ordering as well as $\theta_{23}$ and $\Delta m^2_{31}$. The performance of ORCA with a 6 string configuration and one year of exposure already allowed to exclude the non-oscillation hypothesis with more than $5\,\sigma$. In this contribution an update of these results will be presented and the sensitivity of a full ORCA detector will be discussed.
The neutrino mass ordering (NMO) is one of the last unmeasured fundamental parameters in the neutrino sector of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. NMO studies aim to answer the question of whether the neutrino mass ordering is normal (m3>m2>m1) or inverted (m2>m1>m3). IceCube is an ice-Cherenkov neutrino detector deployed greater than 1.5 kilometers below the surface of the South Pole. Using the DeepCore subarray, the densely-instrumented region of IceCube, we conduct a study of the NMO using neutrino oscillations from atmospheric neutrinos. Matter effects distort the oscillation probabilities for neutrinos (normal ordering) and anti-neutrinos (inverted ordering) traversing the Earth's core with energies below about 15 GeV. Differences in the atmospheric flux and cross-section yield a higher rate of neutrinos than anti-neutrinos in DeepCore, resulting in differences between the normal and inverted orderings in the combined neutrino/anti-neutrino signal. In this talk, we show a study of the NMO sensitivity using nine years of IceCube DeepCore data where a new event selection, reconstruction method, particle identification, and systematic uncertainty modeling are used. The aim is to both provide a higher-energy complementary NMO study to those being conducted by long-baseline neutrino experiments as well as to serve as a preamble for an NMO study using the upcoming IceCube Upgrade, which should significantly improve IceCube's NMO sensitivity.
Super-Kamiokande (SK) is the world's largest underground water Cherenkov detector which has been studying the atmospheric neutrino oscillations since 1996. Atmospheric neutrinos are famous for covering a wide energy range, have both neutrinos and antineutrinos, with electron and muon flavours, which oscillate to tau neutrinos and are sensitive for matter effects in the earth.
In this talk we would like to present updated results on atmospheric neutrino oscillations using five SK periods (data collected from SK-I to SK-V, years 1996-2020). The data analysis has beed improved by expanding the fiducial volume (FV) of the SK, by adding neutrino interactions taking place 1m from the detector walls. This allowed us to increase the data statistics up to 20 %, and thanks to improvement to the reconstruction algorithms we were able to keep systematics uncertainties still satisfactory.
NOvA is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment designed to study and measure a wide range of topics for neutrino physics, such as the neutrino mixing parameters, the neutrino mass hierarchy, and CP violation in the lepton sector. A key component of the success of the experiment is a robust understanding of the systematic uncertainties associated with detector response and calibration. To address this, NOvA has constructed a test beam experiment at the Fermilab Test Beam Facility, which has collected data from 2019 through July 2022.
The NOvA Test Beam experiment uses a scaled-down 30-ton detector to analyze tagged particles from a new tertiary beamline, which can select and identify electrons, muons, pions, kaons and protons with energies from 0.3 to 2 GeV. Using these data, the program will provide NOvA with a better understanding of the largest systematic uncertainties impacting NOvA's analyses, which include the detector response, calibration, and hadronic and electromagnetic energy resolution. In this talk, I will present the status and future plans for the NOvA Test Beam program, along with preliminary results.
The MicroBooNE detector is a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) which recently finished recording neutrinos from both the Booster Neutrino Beam and the Neutrinos at the Main Injector beam at Fermilab. One of the primary physics goals of MicroBooNE is to make detailed measurements of neutrino-argon scattering cross sections, which are critical for the success of future neutrino oscillation experiments. At neutrino energies relevant for the Short-Baseline Neutrino program, the most plentiful event topology involves mesonless final states containing one or more protons. A low reconstruction threshold enabled by LArTPC technology has allowed MicroBooNE to pursue a number of analyses studying neutrino-induced proton production. In this talk, we present several recent cross-section measurements of this reaction mode for both muon and electron neutrinos. The results include MicroBooNE’s first measurements of differential cross sections involving transverse kinematic imbalance and two-proton final states. A first look at lambda baryon production in neutrino-argon scattering is also presented.
One of the main physics goals of the MicroBooNE experiment at Fermilab is to perform high-statistics measurements of neutrino-argon interaction cross sections. These measurements will be essential for future neutrino oscillation experiments, including the Short-Baseline Neutrino program and the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), to achieve an unprecedented level of precision. Inclusive cross-section data provide an important overall benchmark for the interaction modeling needed for these future efforts, and exclusive measurements of neutrino-induced pion production provide insight into the dominant reaction mode at the neutrino energies relevant for DUNE. In this talk, we present some of the latest neutrino-argon cross-section measurements in MicroBooNE, including new results for charged-current inclusive neutrino cross sections and pion-containing final states.
Hadron cross-section measurement is crucial to understand the final-state interactions which accounts for a large source of systematic uncertainty in neutrino oscillation experiments. ProtoDUNE-SP with its charged particle beam data can provide such experimental constraints. This work shows the pion-argon inclusive cross-section measurement using ProtoDUNE-SP Run 1 1 GeV/c beam data. We further develop the slicing method proposed by the LArIAT collaboration and apply it to large scale LArTPC like ProtoDUNE-SP. The cross-sections of pion kinetic energy ranging from 350 MeV to 950 MeV are measured.
NEUT is a neutrino-nucleus interaction simulation. It can be used to simulate interactions for neutrinos with between 100 MeV and a few TeV of energy. NEUT is also capable of simulating hadron interactions within a nucleus and is used to model nucleon decay and hadron--nucleus interactions for particle propagation in detector simulations. This talk describes the range of interaction channels modelled within NEUT, providing details on how each is implemented and on the tools available for propagating associated uncertainties. A range of comparisons of NEUT predictions to lepton and hadron scattering data are also shown.
We explore the connection between neutrino mass models and muon experiments, esp. those looking for charged lepton flavor violation.
Neutrino oscillations are a very well established phenomenon and in the last two decades we have been able to determine almost all the oscillation parameters with few percents precision.
However, there is still room for the possibility of the presence of new physics effects. In this context, long-baseline (LBL) accelerator experiments provide a great environment to probe BSM (Beyond Standard Model) models. These experiments can look at different oscillation channels at both short (near detectors) and long (far detectors) distances, working with well controlled focused neutrino beams. Two of the most promising future LBL experiments are DUNE in the USA and T2HK in Japan, which may be part of a bigger experiment (T2HKK) with a second detector in Korea. We studied the performances of these experiments in constraining different models.
For instance, we took into account the possible Non-Unitarity of the neutrino mixing matrix, searching for the best constraints on new physics parameters that DUNE and T2HKK could be able to set. Moreover, we considered how much the presence of non-standard phases may influence the $\delta_{CP}$ determination.
We also explored the capabilities of DUNE in searching for hints of the existence of Non-Standard-Interactions (NSI) in different benchmark scenarios. Regarding this, we studied the effects of vector and scalar NSI on neutrino oscillations, showing how DUNE will be able to differentiate the models.
We study the evolution of the lepton number for a $SU(2)$ doublet consisting of a massive neutrino and a charged lepton. By choosing a specific initial lepton family for a neutrino we can compute the evolution of all lepton family numbers. Our framework results in additional oscillation phases that are important for nonrelativisitc neutrinos. We study the phenomenology of relativistic and nonrelativistic neutrino physics under this framework. The nonrelativistic region is of particular interest due to the Cosmic Neutrino Background (C$\nu$B) predicted from big bang models. Furthermore, we include important damping effects on the oscillations for the nonrelativistic region by considering a lepton number density. This is based on the works of arXiv:2101.07751 [hep-ph] and arXiv:2106.02783 [hep-ph].
The T2K neutrino experiment in Japan obtained a first indication of CP violation in neutrino oscillations. To obtain better sensitivity, T2K will accumulate more statistics with a higher intensity beam and an upgraded of-axis near detector (ND280). It will allow us to reduce systematic uncertainties in oscillation measurements. The upgraded detector will have the full polar angle coverage for muons produced in neutrino charged current interactions, a low threshold for proton detection and will be able to measure neutrons using time-of-flight due to a good timing performance. Thanks to these new capabilities, the upgrade of ND280 will measure the energy spectra of muon neutrinos and antineutrinos with an unprecedented level of accuracy, and the near-to-far detector extrapolation of systematics constrains will be much less model dependent and therefore more reliable.
A novel 3D highly granular scintillator detector called SuperFGD of a mass of about 2 tons was adopted as an upgraded ND280 fully-active neutrino target and a 4\pi detector of charged particles from neutrino interactions. It will consist of about two millions of small optically-isolated plastic scintillator cubes with a 1 cm side. Each cube is read out in the three orthogonal directions with wave-length shifting fibers coupled to compact photosensors, micro pixel photon counters (MPPCs). Several SuperFGD prototypes tested in beams with charged particles and neutrons demonstrated good performance. It is planned that SuperFGD installed into the ND280 magnet will be ready to accept the beam in the beginning of 2023. In this talk, the main detector parameters, performance of SuperFGD prototypes in beam tests, current status and plans will be reported.
The High-Angle Time Projection Chambers (HA-TPCs) are a new set of detectors that will equip the off-axis near detector (ND280) of the T2K long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment. These detectors will be installed below and above a new Super Fine-Grained Scintillator detector (FGD) in 2023 as part of the upgrade of ND280.
The HATPCs operate at atmospheric pressure with the “T2K gas” mixture contained in a Field Cage with a central cathode splitting the active volume (2.0×1.8×0.8 m3) into two halves (1m long in drift direction).
The thin wall (3cm) Field Cages are built by exploiting composite material techniques with lightweight and low-Z materials.
The readout is done with Resistive Micromegas readout modules (ERAM) that utilizes a resistive foil covering the reading pads, acting as a 2D RC network and allowing a better determination of the deposited charges position. A prototype of the Field Cage instrumented with one ERAM detector has been recently exposed at the DESY electron beam and spatial resolution better than 0.6 mm and dE/dx resolution In order to ensure that the HA-TPCs satisfy the required performances for the ND280 Upgrade (space point resolution better than 600 μm and dE/dx resolution smaller than 10%), the ERAM detectors have been characterized with X-rays sources and by exposing them to the DESY electron beam.
In addition, we have developed a detailed a simulation of the charge spreading phenomenon and of the electronic response, along with new reconstruction methods that exploit both charge and time information from the main and neighboring pads. In this talk we will present the physics associated with such novel technology, the status of simulation and reconstruction efforts, and the performances observed with the DESY Test beam.
To cope with the high event pile-up, the liquid argon time projection chamber of the near detector complex of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment relies on an innovative modular design featuring an advanced high-coverage photon detection system, a true 3D pixelated charge readout, and a low-profile resistive-shell field cage. The capabilities of this detector, including the performance of the charge and light readout systems, the signal matching between the two, the detector purity, and the response uniformity, have been demonstrated with two ton-scale prototypes operated at the University of Bern that acquired large samples of cosmic ray data. The data have been compared to a microphysical detector simulation, performed with highly-parallelized GPU algorithms. The main results from the analysis of these data sets, as well as the overall status of the ND-LAr detector development, will be presented in this talk.
The Neutrino Experiment with a Xenon TPC (NEXT) is an international collaboration searching for the ultra-rare neutrinoless double beta decay process with the xenon-136 isotope. The experimental programme in NEXT consists of a series of high-pressure gaseous xenon time projection chambers with the most recent experiment (NEXT-White) running from 2016 - 2021 consisting of 5 kg of xenon and subsequently, NEXT-100, under commissioning in 2022 and scaling up to 100 kg of xenon. Crucial to the success of the NEXT programme is achieving excellent energy resolution FWHM and reducing backgrounds to negligible levels at the decay energy. This talk will cover the key aspects of the NEXT detectors which enable such goals, the status of the NEXT-100 project, and the extensive R&D efforts being carried out to tag the daughter barium ions from the decay to enable a near background-free neutrinoless double beta decay search.
The unique properties of neutrinos and the international efforts in the field of neutrino physics and neutrino astronomy have drawn significant public attention in recent years. How to successfully transform public interest into a driving force to promote Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Education and Outreach (IDEEO) in fundamental science research relies on many tactical considerations. This report summarizes our outreach experience with engaging high school students in local communities in South Dakota and Wyoming through the IceCube Masterclass. Thoughts on promoting IDEEO in neutrino education jointly in EPSCoR jurisdictions will also be discussed.
Authors: T.Nyawelo, S.Braden, J.N.Matthews & J.Gerton
Refugee youth resettled in the United States experience two main barriers to long-term participation in STEM fields: (a) access to STEM skills and knowledge which is impacted by translocation and interrupted schooling, and (b) access to crafting positive learner identities in STEM as multilingual, multicultural, and multiracial youth. This presentation shares a model for engaging refugee teens in Cosmic Ray research through an NSF-funded project titled: Investigating the Development of STEM-Positive Identities of Refugee Teens in a Physics Out-of-School Time Experience (INSPIRE). The INSPIRE program is designed to address such barriers by offering students participation in three inter-related activities: (1) constructing scintillator cosmic ray detectors then learning how to collect and analyze data using those detectors; (2) creating digital stories (short video documentaries) to document their experience in the cosmic ray research; and (3) family and community science events where students share what they are learning with their families, and eventually, science teachers, researchers, and broader members of the scientific community.
Since 1984 the Italian groups of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and Italian Universities, collaborating with Fermilab have been running a two-month summer training program for Italian university students. While in the first year the program involved only four physics students of the University of Pisa, in the following years it was extended to engineering students. This extension was successful and the engineering students have been well accepted by the Technical, Accelerator and Scientific Computing Division groups. This program has proven to be the most effective way to engage new students in Fermilab endeavours. Many students have extended their collaboration with Fermilab with their Master Thesis and PhD.
Since 2004 the program has been supported in part by DOE in the frame of an exchange agreement with INFN. The program has involved more than 500 Italian students from more than 20 Italian Universities. A handful of students of European and non-European Universities were also accepted in the years.
Each intern is supervised by a Fermilab Mentor. Training programs spanned from Tevatron, CMS, Muon (g-2), Mu2e and SBN (MicroBooNE, ICARUS, SBND) and DUNE design and experimental data analysis, development of particle detectors, design of electronic and accelerator components, development of infrastructures and software for tera-data handling, research on superconductive elements and on accelerating cavities, theory of particle accelerators.
In 2015 the University of Pisa included the program within its own educational programs. The students are required to write summary reports on their achievements. After positive evaluation by a University Examining Board, interns are acknowledged 6 ECTS credits for their Diploma Supplement.
After two years of suspension, we are resuming the Program. The students' are showing great interest.
Information on students' recruiting methods, training programs and final students` evaluation process awill be given.
Visualization is an essential part of research, both to explore one’s data and to communicate one’s findings with others. Many data products in astronomy come in the form of multi-dimensional cubes, and since our brains are tuned for recognition in the 3D world, we ought to display and manipulate these in 3D space. This is possible with virtual reality (VR) devices.
Drawing from our experience developing immersive and interactive 3D experiences from actual science data at the Astrophysical Big Bang Laboratory (ABBL), I will give an overview of the opportunities and challenges that are awaiting astrophysicists in the burgeoning VR space. I will cover both software and hardware matters, as well as practical aspects for a successful delivery to the public.
In this talk, we shall present the latest and tightest cosmological constraints on the neutrino mass scale and the prospects from future surveys. Special attention will be devoted to the interplay between cosmological and laboratory neutrino mass searches, along with the role of neutrinos in solving the present cosmological tensions.
NOvA is a long-baseline beam neutrino experiment. It uses the 700 kW NuMI
beam at Fermilab to send muon neutrinos (or muon antineutrinos) to two functionally identical detectors, located 14.6 mrad off the beam axis. The Near Detector is located at Fermilab, and the 14 kton Far Detector is located 810 km away in Ash River, Minnesota. Both the detectors are tracking calorimeters filled with liquid scintillator which can detect and identify muon and electron neutrino interactions with high efficiency. In order to constrain neutrino oscillations parameters, neutrino mass hierarchy, and the CP-violating phase δCP, NOvA measures the electron neutrino and antineutrino appearance rates, as well as the muon neutrino and antineutrino disappearance rates. This talk will present NOvA's latest results combining both neutrino data (13.6×10^20 POT) and antineutrino data (12.5×10^20 POT).
The Hyper-Kamiokande experiment has a rich long-baseline neutrino program, as well as a variety of other physics goals. The long-baseline program will utilize a world-class neutrino beam produced at the high-intensity J-PARC accelerator constrained by a suite of near detectors. The Hyper-Kamiokande detector is a ~185 kton fiducial volume water Cherenkov detector, located 295 km from the beam neutrino source. Hyper-Kamiokande long-baseline measurements will be sensitive to the leptonic CP violating phase, delta_CP, as well as the atmospheric oscillation parameters, sin^2theta_23 and Delta m^2_32. Combining the long-baseline and atmospheric neutrino measurements at the Hyper-Kamiokande detector will also allow for enhanced sensitivities, and in particular will help to resolve the neutrino mass ordering.
Abstract: The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a next generation, long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment which will utilize high-intensity $\nu_{\mu}$ and $\bar{\nu}_{\mu}$ with peak neutrino energies of ~2.5 GeV produced at Fermilab, over a 1285 km baseline, to carry out a detailed study of neutrino mixing. The neutrino beam has an initial design intensity of 1.2 MW, but has a planned upgrade to 2.4 MW. The unoscillated neutrino flux will be sampled with a near detector complex at Fermilab, and oscillated at the DUNE far detector at the Sanford Underground Research Facility, which will ultimately consist of four modules each containing a total liquid argon mass of 17 kt.
Here, the long-baseline neutrino oscillation sensitivity of DUNE is determined, using a full simulation, reconstruction, and event selection of the far detector and a full simulation and parameterized analysis of the near detector. Detailed uncertainties due to the flux prediction, neutrino interaction model, and detector effects are included. DUNE is able to resolve the neutrino mass ordering to a 5$\sigma$ precision, for all values of the CP-phase, after a 66 kiloton-megawatt-year exposure (kt-MW-yr). It has the potential to observe charge-parity violation in the neutrino sector to a precision of 3$\sigma$ (5$\sigma$) after an exposure of 197 (646) kt-MW-yrs, for 50% of all values of the CP-violating phase. DUNE's sensitivity to other oscillation parameters of interest have been explored.
Hadron production measurements are crucial for helping long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments constrain their beam flux uncertainties and improve oscillation measurements. The proton-carbon reaction is of particular importance, as it serves as the primary neutrino-creating reaction for the T2K and NOvA experiments. The NA61/SHINE experiment has made hadron production measurements for 31 GeV/c, 60 GeV/c, and 120 GeV/c protons on carbon targets. This talk will present recent analysis results of 120 GeV/c protons on a carbon target, which is the reaction foreseen to create the neutrino beam for DUNE. More thin and replica target measurements are planned at NA61/SHINE after CERN's Long Shutdown 2.
SND@LHC is a compact and stand-alone experiment to perform measurements with neutrinos produced at the LHC in a hitherto unexplored pseudo-rapidity region of 7.2 < 𝜂 < 8.4, complementary to all the other experiments at the LHC. The experiment is to be located 480 m downstream of IP1 in the unused TI18 tunnel. The detector is composed of a hybrid system based on an 800 kg target mass of tungsten plates, interleaved with emulsion and electronic trackers, followed downstream by a calorimeter and a muon system. The configuration allows efficiently distinguishing between all three neutrino flavours, opening a unique opportunity to probe physics of heavy flavour production at the LHC in the region that is not accessible to ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. This region is of particular interest also for future circular colliders and for predictions of very high-energy atmospheric neutrinos. The detector concept is also well suited to searching for Feebly Interacting Particles via signatures of scattering in the detector target. The first phase aims at operating the detector throughout LHC Run 3 to collect a total of 150 fb−1. A new era of collider neutrino physics is just starting.
The detection of Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering (CEvNS) performed in 2017 and 2021 with cesium iodide and in 2020 with liquid argon by the COHERENT collaboration has paved the way for precision phenomenological measurements of many diverse physical phenomena.
CEνNS is a neutral current process induced by the exchange of a Z boson that permits to put interesting constraints on nuclear physics, neutrino electromagnetic properties but it also represents a sensitive probe for non-standard interactions (NSI) that are not included in the SM, induced by yet to be discovered neutral vector and scalar bosons.
Recently, CEνNS has also been observed for the first time using antineutrinos from reactors at the Dresden-II site with a germanium detector called NCC-1701, allowing to obtain more stringent and complementary constraints.
In this talk, I will present an overview of the physics reach of CEνNS, presenting, in particular, the state of the art of the constraints on neutrino charge radii, milli-charges, and magnetic moments as well as new limits on NSI and different new physics models involving light vector Z' mediators. Complementarity of CEνNS constraints with nuclear physics with the recent PREX and CREX neutron-skin determinations will also be discussed, highlighting the interplay with the weak-mixing angle determination.
I will compare all the results obtained with the limits derived from other oscillation and scattering experiments and provide prospects for the future, given the large amount of CEνNS experiments that are currently being proposed or under construction.
The DsTau experiment at CERN-SPS has been proposed to measure an inclusive differential cross-section of a Ds production with a consecutive decay to tau lepton in p-A interactions. A precise measurement of the tau neutrino cross section would enable a search for new physics effects such as testing the Lepton Universality (LU) of Standard Model in neutrino interactions. The detector is based on nuclear emulsion providing a sub-micron spatial resolution for the detection of short length and small “kink” decays. Therefore, it is very suitable to search for peculiar decay topologies (“double kink”) of Ds→τ→X. In 2021, the first physics run of the experiment was performed successfully. The collected data corresponds to 30% of the aimed total statistics. In this presentation, the status of data taking and analysis will be presented.
The Accelerator Neutrino Neutron Interaction Experiment (ANNIE) is a 26-ton Gadolinium-loaded water Cherenkov detector located at the Booster Neutrino Beamline at Fermilab. One of the primary physics goals is to measure the number of final-state neutrons from neutrino-nucleus interactions in water. This measurement will improve our understanding of these complex interactions and help reduce the associated systematic uncertainties, thus benefiting the next generation of long-baseline neutrino experiments. ANNIE will achieve its physics goals by using recently developed photodetectors, the Large Area Picosecond Photodetectors (LAPPDs), with better than 100 picosecond time resolution. This talk will present the status of the experiment, the deployment of LAPPDs, the event reconstruction techniques, and the analysis result of the most recent neutrino beam data. ANNIE's Future R&D opportunities demonstrating the use of Water-based Liquid Scintillators as a new neutrino detection medium will also be discussed.
The detection and cross section measurement of Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering (CEvNS) is vital for particle physics, astrophysics and nuclear physics. In 2017，the COHERNET collaboration reported the first observation of CEvNS signal. A new CEvNS detection experiment is under our schedule. Four pure CsI crystals, weight 3kg and coupled with two Photon Multiplier Tubes (PMTs) each, will be cooled down to 77K and placed at China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS) to detect the CEvNS signals produced by neutrinos from stopped pion decays happening within the Tungsten target of CSNS. Owing to the extremely high light yield of pure CsI at 77K (33.5PE/keVee), even though only having a neutrino flux 30% weaker than COHERENT, the detectable signal event rate is still expected to be 540 each year. Low radioactivity materials and devices will be used to construct the detector and strong shielding will be applied to reduce the radioactive background. Dual-PMT readout will be able to reject PMT-related background like Cherenkov light and PMT dark noise. With all the strategies above, we are hoping to reach a signal to background ratio exceeding 4.
We have been using two EJ301 liquid scintillator detectors to investigate the beam related and unrelated background at the location. Our main detector is scheduled to be placed there as soon as CSNS finish their upgrade this summer.
The IsoDAR neutrino source comprises a novel compact cyclotron capable of delivering 10 mA of 60 MeV protons in cw mode and a high-power neutrino production target. It has obtained preliminary approval to run at the new underground facility Yemilab in South Korea. IsoDAR will produce a very pure, isotropic $\bar{\nu}_e$ source, with peak neutrino energy around 6 MeV and endpoint around 15 MeV. Paired with a kton-scale detector like the planned Liquid Scintillator Counter (LSC) at Yemilab, IsoDAR can measure $\bar{\nu}_e$ disappearance through the inverse beta decay (IBD) channel. We expect about 1.67·106 IBD events, and ~7000 $\bar{\nu}_e$ – $e^-$ elastic scatter events in the LSC in five years of running letting us distinguish many different models for sterile neutrinos and improving significantly on existing limits for non-standard interactions (NSI). Finally, IsoDAR@Yemilab is sensitive to new particles produced in the target (such as a light X boson, that decays to $\bar{\nu}_e \nu_e$). Beyond the physics applications, we describe the accelerator developments for IsoDAR that enable us to produce about a mole of neutrinos in five years of running. These include direct injection through a radiofrequency quadrupole, exploiting complex beam dynamics, and application of machine learning in accelerator design and optimization.
The FNAL accelerator complex is poised to reach MW neutrino beams on target for the exploration of the dark sector physics and rare physics program spaces. Future operations of the complex will include the CW capable PIPII linac at beam intensities that have not been seen before [1, 2]. The ambitious beam program relies on multi-turn H− injection into the FNAL Booster and then
extracted into delivery rings or the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) 8 GeV HEP program. These programs will utilize about 1.5% of the PIPII capabilities. Additionally, there are many accelerator engineering challenges that are already known and many that will be discovered. This proposal calls for an intermediate step that will both facilitate the operation of Booster in the PIP-II era, gain operational experience associated with high power injection rings and jump start FNAL beam based dark sector physics program. The PIP-II Accumulator Ring (PAR) is being designed to deliver several hundred kW beam power for a dark sector (DS) program with flexible bunch structures. This step includes the design, construction and installation of a 0.8 GeV accumulator ring (upgradeable to 1+ GeV) to be located in the PIP-II Booster Transfer Line (BTL). The PIP-II accumulator ring (PAR) may be primarily designed around permanent magnets or use standard iron core magnet technology with an aperture selected to accommodate the desired high intensity protons at 0.8 GeV.
PAR will leverage the power of PIPII and create and exciting DS program by the end of the decade.
The ENUBET project aims at reducing to 1% the flux related systematics on a narrow band neutrino beam through the monitoring of the associated charged leptons in an instrumented decay tunnel. A key element of the project is the design of a meson transfer line with conventional magnets that maximizes the yield of K$^+$ and $\pi^+$, while minimizing the total length to reduce meson decays in the not instrumented region. In order to limit particle rates on the tunnel instrumentation, a high level of beam collimation is needed, thus allowing undecayed mesons to reach the end of the tunnel. At the same time a fine tuning of the shielding and the collimators is required to minimize any beam induced background in the decay region. The magnetic lattice is optimized with TRANSPORT: the focusing of mesons from the target is performed with a static (quadrupole-based) system that, coupled with a slow proton extraction scheme, allows for a significant pile-up reduction at the tunnel instrumentation while retaining a particle yield large enough for a high precision neutrino cross section measurement on a 3 year time scale. Charge and momentum selection in a 8.5 GeV$\pm$10% momenum bite is performed by a double dipole system. Shielding elements are optimized with a full simulation of the facility in Geant4. In particular a powerful genetic algorithm is used to scan automatically the parameter space of the collimators in order to find a configuration that minimizes the halo background in the decay tunnel while preserving a large meson yield.
This contribution will report the results of the optimization studies and the final design of the ENUBET beamline, together with doses estimation through a FLUKA simulation. The design of an alternative secondary beamline with a broad momentum range (4, 6, 8.5 GeV/c), that could enhance the physics reach of the facility, is discussed in addition.
The observation of a non-zero permanent electric dipole moment (EDM) of an elementary particle would break both parity and time-reversal symmetries, implying the violation of charge-parity (CP) symmetry under CPT invariance. The Standard Model (SM) predicts subatomic particle EDMs which are so small as to be out of reach of current experiments, such that any observation of a non-zero EDM would indicate a source of CP violation arising from new physics beyond the SM (BSM). Presently, a measurement of muon EDM at the Fermilab $g-2$ experiment is well underway, aiming to exceed the current upper limit – set by the Brookhaven $g-2$ experiment – by two orders of magnitude at $\sim10^{-21}$ $e\cdot$cm; providing a unique opportunity to investigate BSM sources of CP violation in the second generation of leptons. This talk will provide an overview of the muon EDM search at Fermilab, as well as future search experiments.
The muon g-2/EDM experiment at J-PARC (E34) aims to measure muon g-2 and EDM with a low-emittance muon beam realized by the acceleration of thermal muons. Together with other novel techniques, the experiment measures muon g-2 in a different approach from FNAL. The technical design of the experiment has been completed, and the budget is being requested to start the data taking in 2027. In the first phase, the measurement of g-2 with a precision of 0.45 ppm is expected in two years of data acquisition. The statistically limited accuracy of 0.1 ppm is the final goal. In this talk, developments and the current status of the experiment will be presented.
Permanent electric dipole moments (EDMs) are excellent probes of physics beyond the Standard Model. Recently, the muon EDM has been of particular interest due to the tensions in the magnetic anomaly of the muon and the electron and hints of lepton-flavor universality violation in B-meson decays. At PSI, we proposed a dedicated muon EDM search experiment using the frozen-spin technique. In this technique, a radial electric field is applied in a solenoid storage ring with a vertical magnetic field to cancel the muon anomalous precession. The signal of the EDM can be inferred from the up-down asymmetry of the decay positron count versus time. The experiment is planned to take place in two phases. The sensitivity goal of phase I is $3 \times 10^{-21}$ e cm and for phase II, it is 6 $\times 10^{-23}$ e cm. In this talk, I will present the principle and current status of the experiment.
NEXT (Neutrino Experiment with a Xenon TPC) is an international collaboration with the objective of searching for neutrinoless double beta decay in xenon. After an initial R&D phase in which the TPC technology was developed, it was able to successfully run a small (5 kg of xenon) detector, NEXT-White (2016-2021). The detector was hosted at Laboratorio Subterráneo de Canfranc, an underground facility in the Spanish Pyrenees in the border between Spain and France. During this period it demonstrated the essential features of a neutrinoless double beta experiment, to be discussed in this talk: excellent energy resolution, active background discrimination through the combination of both energy and tracking capabilities, and a reliable measurement of the double beta two neutrino mode half-life of Xe-136.
The current phase consists of the construction (ongoing) and operation of a larger (100 kg of xenon) detector, NEXT-100. The data taking is expected to start during the last quarter of 2022. Being a low background experiment, detector materials must be carefully selected and measured. In addition, a reliable simulation of the detector and physics processes is needed in order to evaluate the background contribution to the signal region. This talk also discusses the simulation of the background model for NEXT-100 and its projected physics reach.
Multiple theories beyond the Standard Model predict the existence of heavy neutrinos, such as the Type I or Type III seesaw mechanisms which can explain the light neutrino masses, or left-right symmetric models which restore parity symmetry in weak interactions at higher energy scale and predict right-handed counterparts to the weak gauge bosons. Searches for such heavy Majorana or Dirac neutrinos with the ATLAS detector, which can also lead to boosted or also displaced signatures, will be presented using proton-proton data from the LHC at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV.
The latest results and prospects of searches for heavy neutrinos at the CMS experiment will be presented.
Measuring the solar neutrino flux over gigayear timescales could provide a new window to inform the solar standard model as well as studies of the Earth’s long-term climate. We demonstrate the feasibility of measuring the time evolution of the B8 solar neutrino flux over gigayear timescales using paleo detectors, naturally occurring minerals which record neutrino-induced recoil tracks over geological times. We explore suitable minerals and identify track lengths of 15–30 nm to be a practical window to detect the B8 solar neutrino flux. A collection of ultraradiopure minerals of different ages, each some 0.1 kg by mass, can be used to probe the rise of the B8 solar neutrino flux over the recent gigayear of the Sun’s evolution. We also show that the time-integrated tracks are sensitive to models of the Sun.
As part of a currently ongoing upgrade to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, seven new strings will be deployed in the central region of the detector to enhance the capability to detect neutrinos in the GeV range. A main science objective of the IceCube Upgrade is to improve the calibration of the IceCube detector as a means of reducing systematic uncertainties related to the optical properties of the ice. A novel camera and illumination system, consisting of more than 1900 cameras installed in 700 newly developed optical modules of the IceCube Upgrade, has been developed. A combination of transmission and reflection photographic measurements will be used to measure the optical properties of bulk ice between strings and refrozen ice in the drill hole, to determine module positions, and to survey the local ice environments surrounding the sensor module. In this contribution, we present the production, acceptance testing, and the plan for post-deployment calibration measurements with this camera system.
The Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) is increasingly becoming the chosen technology for current and future precision neutrino oscillation experiments due to its superior capability in particle tracking and energy calorimetry. In LArTPCs, calorimetric information is critical for particle identification, which is the foundation for the neutrino cross-section and oscillation measurements as well as searches for beyond standard model physics. One of the primary challenges in employing LArTPC technology is characterizing its performance and quantifying the associated systematic uncertainties. MicroBooNE, the longest operating LArTPC to date, has performed numerous such measurements, including studies of detector physics and electromagnetic shower reconstruction. Here we present results on the operation and performance of the detector during its data taking, highlighting accomplishments toward calorimetric reconstruction, calibration, and detector physics.
Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a 20 kton liquid scintillator based neutrino experiment, being built in the Guangdong province in Southern China. Its construction is expected to be completed in 2023. The experimental hall is located underground, below a 700 meter rock over-burden, to reduce backgrounds from cosmic rays. JUNO will act as a multipurpose observatory for neutrinos produced by artificial and natural sources. Its primary goal consists in the determination of the neutrino mass ordering (NMO), which can be inferred by measuring the oscillation pattern of electron anti-neutrinos emitted by two nuclear power plants, located at 53 km from the experimental site. Moreover, it will be able to the determine $\sin^2\theta_{12}$, $\Delta m^2_{12}$, $\Delta m^2_{13}$ with unprecedented precision, to perform precision solar neutrino spectroscopy, to measure atmospheric neutrino and geo-neutrinos fluxes, to detect supernova neutrinos, etc.
The detector calibration is a crucial and challenging tile for the success of the JUNO rich physics programme. The calibration strategy is based on the periodical deployment of radioactive sources within the liquid scintillator. The hardware design consists of several independent and low-background subsystems able to deploy the sources in multiple positions, to optimize the energy resolution and to provide a detailed assessment of the detector energy response.
By exploiting this comprehensive calibration program, along with a dual calorimetry technique based on two independent photosensor system, the JUNO central detector will be able to achieve a better than 1% energy linearity and a 3% effective energy resolution, which are crucial requirements for the NMO determination.
This talk is dedicated to the explanation of JUNO calibration strategy and requirements, along with the system hardware design and to the simulation results.
The Short-Baseline Neutrino (SBN) Program at Fermilab consists of multiple Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) detectors in a single neutrino beam. SBN will have a broad physics program that includes GeV-scale neutrino cross section measurements and Beyond Standard Model physics searches including a search for short-baseline neutrino oscillations. Especially for the oscillation program at SBN (and, looking ahead, at DUNE) it is imperative to have accurate and precise energy measurements that can be related to the true neutrino energy. In addition to GeV-scale accelerator neutrino physics, MeV-scale physics is also possible at SBN and DUNE such as in searches for millicharged particles, solar and supernova neutrino detection, and a proposed modification of DUNE to enable a search for neutrinoless double beta decay. These measurements will require further leveraging of the calorimetric information from ionization charge beyond the traditional needs of GeV-scale physics. In this talk, I will review the limits on calorimetric energy precision in a LArTPC. I will also discuss a path for calibrations to improve the accuracy of track-like energy measurements in a LArTPC to the sub-percent level. Two innovations are important here. First, diffusion plays a role in determining the energy scale in LArTPC calibration in a way unappreciated by previous experiments. Second, calibrating from digitized charge to energy directly instead of through a determination of the electronics gain can eliminate the otherwise irreducible systematic uncertainty from existing recombination measurements. We are implementing these techniques now at ICARUS, the far detector in SBN, which has already begun data collection. Looking forward, improved measurements of LAr properties are needed to unlock the best possible energy reconstruction at SBN and DUNE.
The Mu2e experiment will search for charge-lepton flavor violating (CLFV) muon to electron conversion. The signal for this process is a monoenergetic electron, and so a precise momentum measurement of the outgoing electron is required in order to reach the target 90% C.L. sensitivity of 8x10^-17. This is achieved in Mu2e using a low-mass cylindrical straw tracker operated in vacuum, consisting of 21,000 thin-wall mylar straws held at tension. The Mu2e tracker is now in production and will be completed by 2024. We will discuss the design and construction status, and show results from the first 576 straw 'plane' that has been under test since the beginning of 2021.
The Mu2e experiment will search for the charged-lepton flavor violating neutrino-less conversion of a negative muon into an electron in the presence of a nucleus. The experiment's goal is to improve the previous upper limit by four orders of magnitude. Any observation of this process is a clear sign of new physics. The single 105-MeV electron that results from this process can be mimicked by electrons produced by cosmic-ray muons traversing the detector. An active veto detector surrounding the apparatus detects incoming cosmic-ray muons. To reduce the backgrounds to the required level, it must have an efficiency of about 99.99% and excellent coverage. The cosmic ray veto consists of four layers of scintillator counters, each with two embedded wavelength-shifting fibers, whose light is detected by silicon photomultipliers. The design and expected performance of the cosmic ray veto detector will be described. The potential use of very similar technologies in other experiments will be highlighted.
The COMET experiment aims to search for a muon to electron conversion with a single event sensitivity of $3\times10^{-15}$ in its Phase-I in order to explore new physics beyond the Standard Model. In the experiment, a high multiplicity environment is expected around the detector. Many accidental hits may cause a high fake trigger rate that cannot meet the DAQ capability, less than 13 kHz.
To overcome this issue, we are developing the machine learning algorithms implemented onto Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to efficiently select signal like events within an order of a microsecond. We have developed the hardware electronics to meet the timing requirement and confirmed that the simple machine learning algorithms could be populated inside the commercially available FPGAs. In this presentation, we will report the current status of the development and future prospects.
The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory is a 20 kton multi-purpose liquid scintillator detector located at a 700-m underground laboratory in South China (Jiangmen city, Guangdong province). The exceptional energy resolution and the massive volume of the JUNO detector offer great opportunities for addressing many essential topics in neutrino and astroparticle physics. JUNO's primary goals are to determine the neutrino mass ordering and precisely measure the related neutrino oscillation parameters. With reactor neutrino data, JUNO can determine the neutrino mass ordering with great significance and measure the neutrino oscillation parameters $\sin^2\theta_{12}$, $\Delta m^2_{21}$, and $\Delta m^2_{31}/\Delta m^2_{32}$ to the sub-percent precision level. In addition, the atmospheric and solar neutrino measurements at JUNO can also provide important information for oscillation physics. This talk will focus on the oscillation physics potential of JUNO, including the sensitivity analysis and results based on the recent understanding of the detector.
The present global analyses of the available oscillation data still allow $\sin^{2}\theta_{23}=0.5$ at 3$\sigma$ confidence level while, the current best-fit of $\theta_{23}$ strongly suggests $\sin^{2}\theta_{23} \neq 0.5$.Thus, it is imperative to question at what significance maximal 2-3 mixing can be ruled out. We study in great detail the performance of DUNE to establish the deviation from maximality in the 2-3 sector. We also discuss the impact of $\sin^{2}\theta_{23} - \Delta m^{2}_{31}$ degeneracy in establishing non-maximal $\theta_{23}$ and show how this degeneracy can be broken by exploiting the spectral shape information in $\nu$ and $\bar{\nu}$ disappearance events. We find that a 3$\sigma$ (5$\sigma$) determination of non-maximal $\theta_{23}$ is possible in DUNE with an exposure of 336 kt$\cdot$MW$\cdot$years if the true value of $\sin^2\theta_{23} \leq 0.465~(0.450)$ or $\sin^2\theta_{23} \geq 0.554~(0.572)$ for any value of true $\delta_{\mathrm{CP}}$ and true NMO. We also study the individual contributions from appearance and disappearance channels, the impact of systematic uncertainties and marginalization over oscillation parameters, the importance of spectral analysis, and the data from both $\nu$ and $\bar\nu$ runs, while analyzing DUNE's sensitivity to discover non-maximal $\theta_{23}$.
We present our results of tau neutrino events analysis at the Iron Calorimeter (ICAL) detector in India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO). We calculate the tau neutrino interaction with the detector via charged current(CC) interaction over background neutral current (NC) events of neutrinos of all flavors. We find that the presence of tau neutrinos with 10 years exposure at ICAL can be detected with nearly 4 sigma confidence. We show that the tau neutrino events are sensitive to the neutrino oscillation parameters $\theta_{23}$ and $\Delta m^2$. By performing combined analysis of tau neutrino events and muon neutrino events, we show the significant improvement in oscillation parameter $\theta_{23}$ and its octant measurement and moderate improvement in $\Delta m^2$ measurement.
The tension between the T2K and NOvA long-baseline experiments arises mostly due to the mismatch in the $\nu_\mu \to \nu_e$ and ${\bar\nu}_\mu \to {\bar\nu}_e$ appearance data. Assuming vacuum oscillation as the reference point, with maximal $\theta_{23}$ and $\delta_{CP} = 0$, we compute the $\nu_e$/${\bar\nu}_e$ appearance events for each of the experiments. T2K observes a large excess in the $\nu_e$ appearance event sample compared to the expected $\nu_e$ events at the reference point, whereas NOvA observes a moderate excess. The large excess in T2K dictates that $\delta_{CP}$ be anchored at $−90^\circ$ and that $\theta_{23} > \pi/4$ with a preference for normal hierarchy (NH). The moderate excess at NOvA leads to two degenerate solutions: (a) NH, $0 < \delta_{CP} < 180^\circ$, and $\theta_{23} > \pi/4$; (b) inverted hierarchy (IH) with $−180^\circ < \delta_{CP} < 0$, and $\theta_{23} > \pi/4$. This is the main cause of tension between the two experiments. We show that beyond the standard model (BSM) physics scenarios such as non-unitary neutrino mixing, Lorentz invariance violation, and non-standard neutrino interactions, may resolve the tension.
T2K is a long baseline neutrino experiment which exploits a neutrino and antineutrino beam produced at the Japan Particle Accelerator Research Centre (JPARC) to provide world-leading measurements of the parameters governing neutrino oscillation. Neutrino oscillations are measured by tuning the neutrino rates and spectra at a near detector complex, located at JPARC, and extrapolate them to the water-Cherenkov far detector, Super-Kamiokande, located 295 Km away, where oscillations are observed as modifications of such rates and spectra.
The latest T2K results include multiple analysis improvements, in particular a new sample is added at the far detector, requiring the presence of a pion in muon-neutrino interactions. It is the first time that a pion sample is included in the study of neutrino disappearance at T2K and, for the first time, a sample with more than one Cherenkov ring is exploited in the T2K oscillation analysis, opening the road for further samples with charged- and neutral-pion tagging. The inclusion of such sample enables proper control of the oscillated spectrum on a larger neutrino-energy range and on subleading neutrino-interaction processes. Finally, T2K is engaged with the Super-Kamiokande collaboration to combine T2K neutrino beam data and Super-Kamiokande atmospheric data to perform a joint fit to the oscillation parameters. Such combination allows the degeneracies between the measurement of the CP-violating phase $\delta_{CP}$ and the measurement of the ordering of the neutrino mass eigenstates to be lifted. Precise evaluation of the enhanced sensitivity of this joint fit will be presented.
The nuSTORM facility will provide $\nu_e$ and $\nu_\mu$ beams from the decay of low energy muons confined within a storage ring. The neutrino and anti-neutrino energy distributions will be precisely known. The precision goals of the oscillation program require a realistic modeling of neutrino-nucleus scattering dynamics. nuSTORM can contribute to this effort by providing the ultimate experimental program of scattering measurements. The cross section for the scattering on complex nuclei is sensitive to energy and momentum transfers. Data with both muons and electrons in the final state are therefore very valuable. Sensitivity to physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) is provided by nuSTORM’s unique features. This allows sensitive searches for short-baseline flavour transitions, light sterile neutrinos, nonstandard interactions, and non-unitarity. In synergy with the scattering program, new physics searches would also profit from measurements of exclusive final states, allowing for BSM neutrino interactions to be probed in neutrino-electron scattering and by searching for exotic final states. The status of the development of nuSTORM will be reviewed in the context of the renewed effort to develop high-brightness stored muon beams and as a route to very-high energy lepton-anti lepton collisions in the muon collider.
Uncertainty of the neutrino-nucleus interaction models is one of the major sources of systematic uncertainty for neutrino oscillation experiments. The NINJA experiment aims to measure the neutrino-nucleus interactions precisely using a nuclear emulsion detector called Emulsion Cloud Chamber (ECC). The sub-micron spatial resolution and a high sampling rate of the ECC allow us to detect short tracks of low-momentum charged particles such as protons (The momentum threshold for protons is down to 200 MeV/$c$).
So far, we have measured the kinematics of charged particles emitted from neutrino interactions on water or iron in J-PARC using the T2K high-intensity neutrino beam. Multiplicity, angle, and momentum distribution of the charged particles from the neutrino interactions have been compared to the prediction by the Monte Carlo simulation.
From November 2019 to February 2020, the NINJA experiment conducted its first physics run in J-PARC. The 75 kg water-target ECC was exposed to the neutrino beam corresponding to $4.8 \times 10^{20}$ protons on target. In this presentation. we report the latest result of the pilot runs and the current status of neutrino interaction analysis of the physics run. In addition, expected outcomes from and prospects of the NINJA experiment will be discussed in this talk.
A detailed understanding of neutrino-nucleus interactions is essential for the precise measurement of neutrino oscillations at long baseline experiments, such as T2K. The T2K near detector complex, designed to constrain the T2K flux and cross section models, also provides a complementary program of neutrino interaction cross-section measurements. Through the use of multiple target materials (carbon, water, lead, iron), and the ability to sample different neutrino spectra (with detectors located on- and off-axis with respect to the beam direction), T2K is able to investigate atomic number and energy dependence of interaction cross sections in a single experiment. In particular, T2K has recently performed the first joint on/off-axis measurement of the Charged Current channel without pion in the final state. Also, dedicated efforts are devoted to investigate rare or poorly studied interaction channels. Indeed, an improved analysis of the coherent pion production cross section has been recently accomplished, including an antineutrino sample for the first time. Those results, together with an overview of the T2K measurement strategy, adopted to reduce the model dependence, will be presented in this talk.
NOvA is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment primarily designed to measure the muon (anti)neutrino disappearance and electron (anti)neutrino appearance in the off-axis Fermilab NuMI beam. It uses two functionally identical liquid scintillator detectors separated by 810 km and a narrow band beam centered around 2 GeV. Energetic neutral pions produced in $\Delta$ resonance, deep-inelastic interactions or final state interactions are a significant background to the electron (anti)neutrino appearance measurement as the photons coming from neutral pion decay may be misidentified as electrons(positrons). The high statistics antineutrino mode data in the near detector can be used to perform a measurement of the differential cross section for the muon antineutrino charged-current neutral pion production. The analysis uses a convolutional neural network trained on individually simulated particles to identify neutral pions in the final state. A data-driven template fit approach is used to constrain backgrounds. The assessment of systematic uncertainties is also presented.
The Neutrinos from Stored Muons, nuSTORM, facility has been designed to deliver a definitive neutrino-nucleus scattering programme using neutrino beams from the decay of muons confined within a
storage ring. The facility is unique, it will be capable of storing muon beams of both charges with momentum of between 1 GeV/c and 6 GeV/c and a momentum spread of ±16%. The neutrino beams generated will span neutrino energies from approximately 300 MeV to 5.5 GeV allowing neutrino-scattering measurements to be made over the kinematic range of interest to the DUNE and Hyper-K. At nuSTORM, the flavour composition of the beam and the neutrino-energy spectrum are both precisely
known. The storage-ring instrumentation will allow the neutrino flux to be determined to a precision of 1% or better. nuSTORM will: serve the future long- and short-baseline neutrino-oscillation programmes by providing definitive measurements of scattering cross-sections with percent-level precision.
It will extend the search for light sterile neutrinos beyond the sensitivities that will
be provided by the FNAL Short Baseline Neutrino (SBN) programme and
create an essential test facility for the development of muon accelerators to serve as the basis of a multi-TeV lepton-antilepton collider and a Neutrino Factory. Recent progress of R&D studies on nuSTORM are presented.
Current machine concepts developed by Muon Accelerator Program (MAP) for a neutrino factory can be extended to reach the 63~GeV needed for s-channel production of the Higgs boson and beyond, by the addition of one or two RLAs, Envisioned staged approach, assumes a single-pass linac with a combination of 325 and 650 MHz superconducting RF, followed by a Recirculating Linear Accelerator(RLA) configured with 2.9~GeV/pass, 650 MHz superconducting linac based on quadrupole focusing, completed with four `droplet' arcs, where the beam reaches 15 GeV in 4.5 recirculation passes. The chain can be further extended by a subsequent RLA based on Tesla cavities.
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The Fermilab site can accommodate a Muon Collider at up to 10 TeV center of mass energy. Parameters for Fermilab-based muon colliders are presented. Recent related research on rapid-cycling acceleration, muon cooling, proton sources and targetry is discussed. Compatibility with neutrino sources and neutrino factories is also discussed as well as directions for future research.
We report the results from MicroBooNE's search for a single-photon excess in the Booster Neutrino Beam at Fermilab, a potential interpretation to the long-standing MiniBooNE low-energy excess anomaly. We highlight recent results targeting neutrino-induced neutral current resonant ∆(1232) baryon production followed by ∆ radiative decay. Data corresponding to MicroBooNE’s first three years of operations (6.80×10^20 protons on target) were used to search for single-photon events with the backgrounds constrained via an in-situ high-purity measurement of NC π0 events. This provided the world’s most sensitive search for NC ∆→Nγ below 1 GeV and disfavors the hypothesis that anomalously large ∆ radiative decay is the origin of the MiniBooNE low-energy excess. Additional cross-checks to this analysis utilizing a separate reconstruction framework are presented, along with plans and progress towards both a model-independent inclusive photon search, and new model-dependent search targeting NC coherent-like single-photon production.
The ICARUS detector will search for LSND-like neutrino oscillations exposed at shallow depth to the FNAL BNB beam as the far detector in the Short-Baseline Neutrino (SBN) program. Cosmic backgrounds rejection is particularly important for the ICARUS detector due to its larger size and distance from neutrino production compared to the near detector SBND. In ICARUS the neutrino signal over cosmic background ratio is 40 times more unfavorable compared to SBND, in addition a greater than 3 times larger out-of-spill comics rate. On this poster, I will illustrate techniques for reducing cosmogenic backgrounds in the ICARUS detector.
The abundance of dark matter in the Universe could be explained by heavy dark matter. Dark matter is expected to be accumulated near the center of massive astrophysical objects, and the decay of it could produce highly energetic neutrinos detectable at Earth with large neutrino telescopes. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a cubic kilometer-scale neutrino telescope located under 1.5 km of ice near the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. With the discovery of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos, IceCube has demonstrated the ability to observe neutrinos of extraterrestrial origin. The sources of these astrophysical neutrinos remain largely unknown, making searches for exotic origins very timely. We present an analysis that searches for dark matter decay in extragalactic sources, using nine years of IceCube data. The sources considered are galaxy clusters, dwarf galaxies, and the Andromeda galaxy. We focus on heavy decaying dark matter with masses from 10 TeV to 100 PeV and consider several benchmark decay channels into pairs of Standard Model particles. We use well-established neutrino event selection criteria for neutrino candidate events from the northern sky. In this contribution, we present the latest analysis status and sensitivities calculated using the individual sources and by stacking the sources within the same source class.
The IceCube neutrino observatory--installed in the Antarctic ice--is the largest neutrino telescope to date. It consists of 5,160 photomultiplier-tubes spread among 86 vertical strings making a total detector volume of more than a cubic kilometer. IceCube detects neutrinos via Cherenkov light emitted by charged relativistic particles produced when a neutrino interacts in or near the detector. The detector is particularly sensitive to high-energy neutrinos of due to its size and photosensor spacing. In this analysis we search for dark matter that annihilates into a metastable mediator that subsequently decays into Standard Model particles. These models yield an enhanced high-energy neutrino flux from dark matter annihilation inside the Sun compared to models without a mediator. Signals produceddirectly inside the solar plasma are subject to strong attenuation. Mediators produced by secluded dark matter can however escape the Sun and avoid any such attenuation. We present the results of an analysis of six years of IceCube data looking for dark matter in the Sun for dark matter masses ranging from 200 GeV to 75 TeV.
The workshop will focus on negotiation and communication skills useful to physics researchers as they navigate their careers, including how to: