A Search for Anomalous Muon Neutrino Disappearance and Tau Neutrino Appearance using NOvA Near Detector

Thesis/Dissertation · Tue Jan 01 04:00:00 EST 2019

OSTI ID:1656615

Keloth, Rijeesh ^[1]

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1. Cochin U.

The NOvA experiment consists of two finely segmented, liquid scintillator detectors operating 14.6 mrad off-axis from the NuMI muon-neutrino beam. The Near Detector (ND) is located in the Fermilab campus, 1 km from the NuMI target, while the Far Detector (FD) is located at Ash River, MN, 810 km from the NuMI target. The NOvA experiment is primarily designed to measure electron-neutrino appearance at the FD using the ND to control systematic uncertainties. However, the ND is well suited to search for anomalous short-baseline (SBL) oscillations. The standard three-flavor neutrino oscillations have well explained by a wide range of neutrino experiments. The anomalous results, such as electron-antineutrino excess seen by LSND and MiniBooNE do not fit the three-flavor paradigm. This can be explained by an additional fourth flavor sterile neutrino at a larger mass scale than the existing three flavor neutrinos. This thesis presents a novel method for selecting tau neutrino interact ions with high purity at the ND using a convolutional neural network (CNN). Using this method, the preliminary sensitivities of anomalous SBL muon-neutrino disappearance and tau-neutrino appearance due to sterile neutrino oscillations in NOvA are shown.

• Research Organization: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP) (SC-25)
• DOE Contract Number: AC02-07CH11359
• OSTI ID: 1656615
• Report Number(s): FERMILAB-THESIS-2019-25; oai:inspirehep.net:1813459
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS