Precision Studies of Neutrino Oscillations and Interactions

中微子振荡和相互作用的精确研究

• 批准号: 1506309
• 负责人: Jeffrey Nelson
• 金额: $ 144万
• 依托单位: College of William and Mary
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-08-01 至 2019-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1506309&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Precision; Studies; Neutrino; Oscillations; Interactions

One of the major intellectual achievements of the 20th century was the development of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. This model succeeded in classifying all of the elementary particles known at the time into a hierarchy of groups having similar quantum properties. The validity of this model to date was recently confirmed by the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. However, the Standard Model as it currently exists leaves open many questions about the universe, including such fundamental questions as to why the Higgs mass has the value it has and why there is no antimatter in the universe. A primary area to search for answers to these and other open questions about the universe, how it came to be and why it is the way it is, is to focus on a study of the properties of neutrinos and to use what we know and can learn about neutrinos as probes of science beyond the Standard Model. Neutrinos are those elementary particles that interact with practically nothing else in the universe. They have no electric charge and were once thought to be massless. Like other elementary particles, they were believed to have an antimatter counterpart, the antineutrino. Moreover, the Standard Model predicted that there were actually three different kinds of neutrinos that were distinguishable through the different interactions that they did undergo whenever there was an interaction. But recent measurements have totally changed our picture of neutrinos. We now know that neutrinos do have a mass and because they do, they can actually change from one type to another. Detailed measurements of these changes, along with other current neutrino experiments, form one of the most promising ways to probe for new physics Beyond the Standard Model (BSM), and are the subject of this investigation. This research will involve the work of two post-doctoral researchers as well as graduate and undergraduate students.This award supports work, using the neutrino beam at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL), on three related neutrino experiments: MINERvA, Nova and MINOS+ all measuring neutrino oscillations: muon neutrino to electron neutrino transitions. To correctly measure these transitions, precise knowledge of neutrino interactions is required. This award will be used to measure (using the MINERvA detector) these interactions across a wide energy range available at FNAL. This will improve our knowledge of the neutrino flux, useful for future Short Baseline (detector near the source at FNAL) and Long Baseline (detector hundreds of kilometers away) experiments as well as the current Nova experiment. The work on the MINOS+ experiment will help map out the shape of the energy dependence of the neutrino oscillation probability, which could reveal new anomalies in the neutrino sector. A number of BSM proposed phenomena, from sterile neutrinos to extra dimensions, can cause measurable deviations in the neutrino oscillation probability in the 4-10GeV range.

20世纪的主要智力成就之一是粒子物理标准模型(SM)的发展。这个模型成功地将当时已知的所有基本粒子归入具有相似量子性质的群组的层次结构中。最近在欧洲核子研究中心的大型强子对撞机上发现的希格斯玻色子证实了这个模型到目前为止的有效性。然而，目前存在的标准模型留下了许多关于宇宙的问题，包括为什么希格斯质量具有它的价值，为什么宇宙中没有反物质等基本问题。要寻找这些和其他关于宇宙的悬而未决的问题的答案，它是如何形成的，为什么它是这样的，一个主要的领域是专注于中微子的性质的研究，并将我们所知道和可以了解的中微子用作超越标准模型的科学探测器。中微子是那些与宇宙中几乎任何其他东西都不相互作用的基本粒子。它们没有电荷，曾经被认为是无质量的。与其他基本粒子一样，它们被认为有一个反物质的对应物，即反中微子。此外，标准模型预测，实际上有三种不同类型的中微子可以通过不同的相互作用来区分，无论何时发生相互作用，它们都会经历不同的相互作用。但最近的测量完全改变了我们对中微子的看法。我们现在知道中微子确实有质量，因为它们有质量，所以它们实际上可以从一种类型变成另一种类型。对这些变化的详细测量，以及目前的其他中微子实验，形成了探索超越标准模型(BSM)的新物理的最有希望的方法之一，也是本次调查的主题。这项研究将涉及两名博士后研究人员以及研究生和本科生的工作。该奖项支持费米国家加速器实验室(FNAL)使用中微子束进行的三项相关中微子实验：Minerva、Nova和MINOS+，所有这些实验都测量中微子振荡：Muon中微子到电子中微子的转变。为了正确测量这些跃迁，需要对中微子相互作用的精确知识。该奖项将被用来测量(使用Minerva探测器)在FNAL可用的广泛能量范围内的这些相互作用。这将提高我们对中微子通量的了解，这对未来的短基线(FNAL源附近的探测器)和长基线(数百公里外的探测器)实验以及目前的Nova实验都很有用。MINOS+实验的工作将有助于绘制出中微子振荡概率的能量依赖关系的形状，这可能会揭示中微子部门的新异常。BSM提出的一些现象，从稀薄的中微子到额外的维度，可以在4-10GeV范围内引起中微子振荡几率的可测量偏差。