First neutrino oscillation measurements in NOvA

AbstractThe NOvA experiment uses the Fermilab NuMI neutrino beam and a newly constructed 14 kt detector to address several open questions in neutrino oscillations including the neutrino mass hierarchy, the precise value of the angle θ23, and the CP-violating phase δCP. The experiment has been running since 2014 and has recently released its first results from an equivalent exposure of 2.74×1020 protons-on-target equal to 8% of the eventual data set. Measurements of νμ→νμ oscillations find Δm322=(2.52−0.18+0.20)×10−3 eV2 and 0.38<sin2⁡θ23<0.65 for the normal neutrino mass hierarchy. The experiment has observed νμ→νe oscillations at 3.3 σ C.L. in this early data and disfavors the inverted neutrino mass hierarchy in the range 0.1π<δCP<0.5π at the 90% C.L

Calibration of Super-Kamiokande Using an Electron Linac

In order to calibrate the Super-Kamiokande experiment for solar neutrino measurements, a linear accelerator (LINAC) for electrons was installed at the detector. LINAC data were taken at various positions in the detector volume, tracking the detector response in the variables relevant to solar neutrino analysis. In particular, the absolute energy scale is now known with less than 1 percent uncertainty.Comment: 24 pages, 16 figures, Submitted to NIM

Measurement of a small atmospheric νμ/νe\nu_\mu/\nu_e ratio

From an exposure of 25.5~kiloton-years of the Super-Kamiokande detector, 900 muon-like and 983 electron-like single-ring atmospheric neutrino interactions were detected with momentum $p_e > 100$ MeV/$c$, $p_\mu > 200$ MeV/$c$, and with visible energy less than 1.33 GeV. Using a detailed Monte Carlo simulation, the ratio $(\mu/e)_{DATA}/(\mu/e)_{MC}$ was measured to be $0.61 \pm 0.03(stat.) \pm 0.05(sys.)$, consistent with previous results from the Kamiokande, IMB and Soudan-2 experiments, and smaller than expected from theoretical models of atmospheric neutrino production.Comment: 14 pages with 5 figure

Supernova neutrino detection in NOvA

The NOvA long-baseline neutrino experiment uses a pair of large, segmented, liquid-scintillator calorimeters to study neutrino oscillations, using GeV-scale neutrinos from the Fermilab NuMI beam. These detectors are also sensitive to the flux of neutrinos which are emitted during a core-collapse supernova through inverse beta decay interactions on carbon at energies of O(10 MeV). This signature provides a means to study the dominant mode of energy release for a core-collapse supernova occurring in our galaxy. We describe the data-driven software trigger system developed and employed by the NOvA experiment to identify and record neutrino data from nearby galactic supernovae. This technique has been used by NOvA to self-trigger on potential core-collapse supernovae in our galaxy, with an estimated sensitivity reaching out to 10 kpc distance while achieving a detection efficiency of 23% to 49% for supernovae from progenitor stars with masses of 9.6 M☉ to 27 M☉, respectively

Highly-parallelized simulation of a pixelated LArTPC on a GPU

The rapid development of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) is allowing the implementation of highly-parallelized Monte Carlo simulation chains for particle physics experiments. This technique is particularly suitable for the simulation of a pixelated charge readout for time projection chambers, given the large number of channels that this technology employs. Here we present the first implementation of a full microphysical simulator of a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) equipped with light readout and pixelated charge readout, developed for the DUNE Near Detector. The software is implemented with an end-to-end set of GPU-optimized algorithms. The algorithms have been written in Python and translated into CUDA kernels using Numba, a just-in-time compiler for a subset of Python and NumPy instructions. The GPU implementation achieves a speed up of four orders of magnitude compared with the equivalent CPU version. The simulation of the current induced on 10^3 pixels takes around 1 ms on the GPU, compared with approximately 10 s on the CPU. The results of the simulation are compared against data from a pixel-readout LArTPC prototype

SciNOvA: A Measurement of Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering in a Narrow-Band Beam

We propose to construct and deploy a fine-grained detector in the Fermilab NOvA 2 GeV narrow-band neutrino beam. In this beam, the detector can make unique contributions to the measurement of quasi-elastic scattering, neutral-current elastic scattering, neutral-current {pi}{sup 0} production, and enhance the NOvA measurements of electron neutrino appearance. To minimize cost and risks, the proposed detector is a copy of the SciBar detector originally built for the K2K long baseline experiment and used recently in the SciBooNE experiment