A study of neutrino oscillations in MINOS

Abstract

MINOS is a long-baseline neutrino oscillations experiment located at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL), USA. It makes use of the NuMI neutrino beamline and two functionally identical detectors located at distances of ~1km and ~735km from the neutrino production target respectively. The Near Detector measures the composition and energy spectrum of the neutrino beam with high precision while the Far Detector looks for evidence of neutrino oscillations. This thesis presents work conducted in two distinct areas of the MINOS experiment: analysis of neutral current and charged current interactions. While charged current events are only sensitive to muon neutrino disappearance, neutral current events can be used to distinguish oscillations into sterile neutrinos from those involving only active neutrino species. A complete, preliminary neutral current study is performed on simulated data. This is followed by a more detailed investigation of neutral current neutrino interactions in the MINOS Near Detector. A procedure identifying neutral current interactions and rejecting backgrounds due to reconstruction failures is developed. Two distinct event classification methods are investigated. The selected neutral current events in the Near Detector are used to extract corrections to the neutral current cross-section in the MINOS Monte Carlo simulation as a function of energy. The resulting correction factors are consistent with unity. The main MINOS charged current neutrino disappearance analysis is described. We present the Monte Carlo tuning procedure, event selection, extrapolation from Near to Far Detector and fit for neutrino oscillations. Systematic errors on this measurement are evaluated and discussed in detail. The data are consistent with neutrino oscillations with the following parameters: 2.74 $+0.44\atop{-0.26}$ x 10-3 eV2 and sin2(2θ23) > 0.87 at 68% confidence level.