Probing the Mysteries of Neutrinos with MINOS and NOvA

Caius Howcroft, Postdoctoral Scholar, High Energy Physics, Caltech

The 40 year old mysteries of neutrinos have begun to be revealed through a series of key experiments. The quest continues, as the pattern of small neutrino masses and large mixings is without explanation, and lies entirely beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. Following Ray Davis' discovery of the solar neutrino deficit a long series of experiments struggled to understand the deficit and its cause. Recent experiments measuring neutrinos from the Sun, produced in the atmosphere, from reactors and from accelerators have at last shown, against earlier expectations, that neutrinos of one flavor do indeed oscillate into other flavors.

Caltech has been at the forefront of studying neutrinos for the last 30 years. The late Doug Michael invented a new massive magnetized detector concept, recently realized in the MINOS experiment, where neutrinos from an intense beam at Fermilab are detected before or after their 735 km flight to the deep-underground Soudan mine in northern Minnesota. MINOS has recently measured both atmospheric and beam neutrinos, resulting in a more precise determination of the mass- squared difference between the second and third neutrino generations. I will review these results and the prospects for more precise measurements, the search for the subdominant mixing among the first and third generations, and the potential for determining the antineutrino mass-squared-difference based on our recent ideas. I will also introduce the much larger NOvA experiment, now under development, that will utilize key ideas from Michael and others at Caltech, and will seek to determine the mass differences and the mixings among all three neutrino generations precisely.