Department of Physics
Research, teaching and outreach in Physics at UW–Madison

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NPAC (Nuclear/Particle/Astro/Cosmo) Forum
Three flavour neutrino oscillations with MINOS and CHIPS
Date: Friday, May 22nd
Time: 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Place: 5280 Chamberlin Hall
Speaker: Andy Perch, University College London
Abstract: Neutrinos created in one flavour state (electron, muon, and tau) can oscillate into a different one as they propagate. Such oscillations imply that states of a given flavour are really superpositions of three mass states, with the rate of oscillations depending on the difference in squared masses of these states. These differences have two characteristic scales, one measurable with solar neutrinos, and one with neutrinos from atmospheric and accelerator sources, so early experiments assumed mixing between only two flavours.

With larger and more precise detectors the full three-flavour structure can to begin to be probed. The mass ordering of the three states is accessible via neutrino interactions with matter as they propagate through the Earth, whilst the possibility that neutrino oscillations violate charge parity symmetry can be probed via electron neutrino appearance in a muon neutrino beam. In this talk I will discuss an update to the MINOS atmospheric neutrino analysis, and discuss CHIPS: an R&D experiment aiming to build a large water Cherenkov detector in a flooded mine pit in Northern Minnesota, which deployed a small prototype in the summer of 2014.
Host: Kael Hanson
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