Neutrino Oscillation Search at MiniBooNE

This article reports the status of a $\nu_{\mu} \to \nu_{e}$ oscillation search in MiniBooNE (Booster Neutrino Experiment) experiment. If an appearance signal is observed, it will imply Physics Beyond the Standard Model such as the existence of light sterile neutrino.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures. Plenary talk at the Neutrino Oscillation Workshop (NOW2006), September 2006, to be published in Nucl.Phys. B (Proc. Suppl.

Review of Reactor Antineutrino Experiments

As discussed elsewhere, the measurement of a non-zero value for $\theta_{13}$ would open up a wide range of possibilities to explore CP-violation and the mass hierarchy. Experimental methods to measure currently the unknown mixing angle $\theta_{13}$ include accelerator searches for the $\nu_{e}$ appearance and precise measurements of reactor antineutrino disappearance. The reactor antineutrino experiments are designed to search for a non-vanishing mixing angle $\theta_{13}$ with unprecedented sensitivity. This document describes current reactor antineutrino experiments and synergy between accelerator searches for the $\nu_{e}$ appearance and precise measurements of reactor antineutrino disappearance.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, Review talk given at NuFact 2011, XIIIth InternationalWorkshop on Neutrino Factories, Super beams and Beta beams, CERN/UNIGE, Geneva, Switzerland, August 1-6, 201

Novel Technique for Ultra-sensitive Determination of Trace Elements in Organic Scintillators

A technique based on neutron activation has been developed for an extremely high sensitivity analysis of trace elements in organic materials. Organic materials are sealed in plastic or high purity quartz and irradiated at the HFIR and MITR. The most volatile materials such as liquid scintillator (LS) are first preconcentrated by clean vacuum evaporation. Activities of interest are separated from side activities by acid digestion and ion exchange. The technique has been applied to study the liquid scintillator used in the KamLAND neutrino experiment. Detection limits of <2.4X10**-15 g 40K/g LS, <5.5X10**-15 g Th/g LS, and <8X10**-15 g U/g LS have been achieved.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Nuclear Instruments and Methods

A Letter of Intent to Build a MiniBooNE Near Detector: BooNE

There is accumulating evidence for a difference between neutrino and antineutrino oscillations at the $\sim 1$ eV$^2$ scale. The MiniBooNE experiment observes an unexplained excess of electron-like events at low energies in neutrino mode, which may be due, for example, to either a neutral current radiative interaction, sterile neutrino decay, or to neutrino oscillations involving sterile neutrinos and which may be related to the LSND signal. No excess of electron-like events ($-0.5 \pm 7.8 \pm 8.7$), however, is observed so far at low energies in antineutrino mode. Furthermore, global 3+1 and 3+2 sterile neutrino fits to the world neutrino and antineutrino data suggest a difference between neutrinos and antineutrinos with significant ($\sin^22\theta_{\mu \mu} \sim 35$) $\bar \nu_\mu$ disappearance. In order to test whether the low-energy excess is due to neutrino oscillations and whether there is a difference between $\nu_\mu$ and $\bar \nu_\mu$ disappearance, we propose building a second MiniBooNE detector at (or moving the existing MiniBooNE detector to) a distance of $\sim 200$ m from the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) production target. With identical detectors at different distances, most of the systematic errors will cancel when taking a ratio of events in the two detectors, as the neutrino flux varies as $1/r^2$ to a calculable approximation. This will allow sensitive tests of oscillations for both $\nu_e$ and $\bar \nu_e$ appearance and $\nu_\mu$ and $\bar \nu_\mu$ disappearance. Furthermore, a comparison between oscillations in neutrino mode and antineutrino mode will allow a sensitive search for CP and CPT violation in the lepton sector at short baseline ($\Delta m^2 > 0.1$ eV$^2$).Comment: 43 pages, 40 figure

Development of Wireless Techniques in Data and Power Transmission - Application for Particle Physics Detectors

Wireless techniques have developed extremely fast over the last decade and using them for data and power transmission in particle physics detectors is not science- fiction any more. During the last years several research groups have independently thought of making it a reality. Wireless techniques became a mature field for research and new developments might have impact on future particle physics experiments. The Instrumentation Frontier was set up as a part of the SnowMass 2013 Community Summer Study [1] to examine the instrumentation R&D for the particle physics research over the coming decades: {\guillemotleft} To succeed we need to make technical and scientific innovation a priority in the field {\guillemotright}. Wireless data transmission was identified as one of the innovations that could revolutionize the transmission of data out of the detector. Power delivery was another challenge mentioned in the same report. We propose a collaboration to identify the specific needs of different projects that might benefit from wireless techniques. The objective is to provide a common platform for research and development in order to optimize effectiveness and cost, with the aim of designing and testing wireless demonstrators for large instrumentation systems