Study of Neutrino Interactions in MINOS [report]

Richa Sharma
2014 unpublished
Acknowlegements The work presented in this thesis has been made possible with the help of the many MINOS collaborators and the support of my family and friends. First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisors Dr. Vipin Bhatnagar, Prof. Brajesh C. Choudhary, and Dr. Robert K. Plunkett for providing me guidance and encouragement throughout my Ph.D. years. Thank you for your advice and support over the last five years. I am thankful to the conveners of the our group Justin Evans, Mike
more » ... osky, Donna Naples, Alex Sousa, and Jeff Hartnell who offered me all the help I needed for learning the MINOS software and performing my analysis tasks. I would like to thank Zeynep Isvan for teaching me the basics of performing an analysis and for always being there to help me debug my terrible programming mistakes. I would particularly like to thank Benton Pahlka, Joachim Kopp, and Teppei Katori for their help in making me understand the model on which the present thesis is based and in getting me started with the analysis. Special thanks to Joao A. B. Coehlo for all his help in the final stages of my work. Thanks also to Robert Hatcher and Art Kreymer who were always there to help me with the computing needs. My visit to Fermilab would not have been possible without adequate financial support. Thanks to the India-Fermilab Neutrino Collaboration and Panjab University, Chandigarh for providing me the opportunity to work at Fermilab and supporting my stay. I would like to thank all my friends and fellow students at Fermilab and Panjab University for making my stay at these two places enjoyable. Thanks also for helping me with all the official complexities of PhD. It would have been enormously more difficult to do it alone. iii Finally, this would not have been possible without the support of my family. Many thanks to my parents and sister for their love and encouragement. This would not have been possible without you. iv Abstract MINOS stands for Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search. It is a long baseline experiment located in the USA and is composed of two detectors. The Near Detector is at Fermilab, 1 km from the source of neutrinos. The Far Detector is in Minnesota at a distance of 735 km from the source. Both detectors are steel scintillator tracking calorimeters. MINOS searches for neutrino oscillations by comparing the neutrino energy spectrum at the Far Detector with that obtained from a prediction based on the spectrum at the Near Detector. The primary aim of MINOS is to measure the atmospheric oscillation parameters ∆m 2 32 and θ 23 . CPT symmetry requires that these parameters should be same for neutrinos and antineutrinos. Differences between neutrino and antineutrino oscillations would be an indication of new physics beyond the neutrino-Standard Model (νSM). Additionally, violation of Lorentz or CPT symmetry could also give rise to oscillations different from that expected from the νSM predictions, such as neutrino to antineutrino transitions.
doi:10.2172/1209536 fatcat:rsofwjqmcndovdfslzynkymq6a