![]() Determining the detailed energy-dependent cross sections provides physicists with an essential piece of information to study neutrino oscillations. Not only are neutrino interactions extremely complex in nature, but there is also a large energy spread within every neutrino beam. Scientists know that these oscillations depend on neutrinos’ energy, among other parameters, but that energy is very challenging to estimate. One of the most important neutrino properties that DUNE will investigate is how the particles oscillate between three distinct “flavors”: muon neutrino, tau neutrino, and electron neutrino. “Our ultimate goal is to study the properties of neutrinos, but first we need to better understand how neutrinos interact with the material in a detector, such as argon atoms.” ![]() “The neutrino-argon cross section represents how argon nuclei respond to an incident neutrino, such as those in the neutrino beam produced by MicroBooNE or DUNE,” said Brookhaven Lab physicist Xin Qian, leader of Brookhaven’s MicroBooNE physics group. Their work published today in Physical Review Letters. Now, a team effort led by scientists at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, in collaboration with researchers from Yale University and Louisiana State University, has further refined those techniques by measuring the neutrino-argon cross section. MicroBooNE physicists have been refining LArTPC techniques for large-scale detectors at DUNE. To identify elusive neutrinos, both experiments use a low-noise liquid-argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) - a sophisticated detector that captures neutrino signals as the particles pass through frigid liquid argon kept at negative 303 degrees Fahrenheit. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, has been collecting data on neutrinos since 2015, partially as a testbed for DUNE, which is currently under construction. The MicroBooNE experiment, located at the U.S. Understanding these mysterious particles could unlock some of the biggest secrets of the universe. While they endlessly bombard every inch of Earth’s surface at nearly the speed of light, neutrinos can travel through a lightyear’s worth of lead without ever disturbing a single atom. Neutrinos are tiny subatomic particles that are both famously elusive and tremendously abundant. ![]() A close-up view of a muon neutrino argon interaction within an event display at MicroBooNE, one out of 11,528 events used to extract energy-dependent muon neutrino argon interaction cross sections.
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