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| Description | Speaker: Bob Wilson, Colorado State University Host: Bob Svoboda Abstract:Forty years ago as an undergraduate contemplating graduate school in high energy physics, I declined a research assistantship to work on a neutrino experiment because neutrinos weren't interesting ... massless, weakly interacting so barely any events to analyze even in massive detectors, and all you got for your effort were structure functions. How things have changed. The more we learn, the more we realize that there is more to know about neutrinos, the most abundant matter particle in the universe. In the decades since my naïve snubbing of this intriguing particle we have developed a well-established three-flavor paradigm that may help explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe. But beyond that, a few intriguing measurement "anomalies" hint at the existence of something stranger still, a neutrino that does not interact via any known forces except gravity, a sterile neutrino. I will give a brief introduction to measurements from mega-Curie radioactive sources, nuclear reactors, and accelerators that motivated a definitive search for sterile neutrinos with a mass in the 1 eV range – the Short-Baseline Neutrino program at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. I will describe the two detectors that will provide a measurement of the appearance of electron-type neutrinos in a muon-type neutrino beam using massive liquid argon time-projection chambers with an emphasis on the 760-ton far detector developed by the ICARUS collaboration. This detector first demonstrated the viability of the technology for large-scale experiments such as the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) mega-project. |
| Date | Tue, May 26, 2020 |
| Time | 4:10pm-5:10pm PDT |
| Duration | 1 hour |
| Access | Public |
| Created by | High-Energy Seminars |
| Updated | Tue, May 26, 2020 9:39am PDT |
