Abstract
Anomalous results from past neutrino experiments have been interpreted as potential evidence for an additional sterile neutrino with a mass on order of 1 eV, but this evidence remains inconclusive. The NOvA Near Detector is a 300 ton almost fully-active fine-grained liquid scintillator detector, that was designed for electron-neutrino identification. The detector is placed along the Fermilab NuMI beam line 1 km from the target and 14.6 mrad off-axis. At this off-axis angle the detector is exposed to a narrow band beam peaked at 2 GeV. Therefore the NOvA Near Detector will see neutrinos with a L/E range that is sensitive to oscillations between active neutrinos and light sterile neutrinos. In this report we discuss NOvA sensitivity from the joint electron-neutrino appearance and muon-neutrino disappearance analysis search for short-baseline sterile neutrino mixing.
Highlights
Introduction to Neutrino Physics1.1 The BeginningRadioactivity was first discovered by Henri Becquerel in Uranium in 1896 [1,2,3,4], and, two years later, by Madame Curie in Thorium [5]
The NOvA Near Detector is placed at a L/E centered at ∼ 0.5 km/GeV, consistent with the L/E range probed by Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) and MiniBooNE, providing an opportunity to probe for the signature of active to sterile neutrino oscillations
I have shown the NOvA experiment’s potential to probe the anomalous results seen by the past short-baseline experiments by searching for the νe appearance and νμ disappearance at the NOvA Near Detector. If those anomalous results were due to the existence of fourth flavour neutrino with a mass larger than the standard 3-flavour neutrinos, the NOvA Near-Detector is expected to see the modifications in the NuMI flux due to active to sterile oscillations
Summary
6.3 This table shows the event rates expected for νe appearance channel at the LSND best fit point (sin22θ, ∆m2) = (0.003, 1.2 eV2) and the global best-fit (sin22θ, ∆m2) = (0.00048, 1.7 eV2) [87, 88] oscillation parameters. 125 xxiii xxiv 6.4 This table shows the event rates expected for νμ appearance channel at the LSND best fit point (sin22θ, ∆m2) = (0.003, 1.2 eV2) and the global best-fit (sin22θ, ∆m2) = (0.00048, 1.7 eV2) [87, 88] oscillation parameters. 126
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