Neutrino Oscillations at NOvA and DUNE

Speaker: 
Jianming Bian
Institution: 
UCI
Date: 
Thursday, October 10, 2019
Time: 
3:30 pm
Location: 
RH 101
Abstract: 
The observation of neutrino oscillation has revolutionized neutrino physics and opened a door to answer two fundamental questions of interest. First, whether neutrinos and their antimatter twins, antineutrinos, follow the same law of physics (if CP symmetry holds)? Second, what is the ordering of the neutrino mass eigenstates? NOvA and DUNE are the current and future major neutrino programs in the US aiming to solve these questions. Both projects are long-baseline neutrino experiments that use multi-kiloton detectors to measure accelerator produced neutrinos at far distances (NOvA: 810 km, DUNE: 1300 km). In this talk, I will present the latest NOvA results on muon (anti-)neutrino disappearance and electron (anti-)neutrino appearance. Our new results indicate normal neutrino mass ordering. Beyond the current NOvA results, I will discuss the status and physics reach of the DUNE experiment, as well as the first data taken from DUNE's prototype detectors at CERN.
 
Reconstruction of neutrino interactions in NOvA and DUNE's high-resolution detectors is challenging. It is complicated by detector energy responses, particle identities, and overlaps between lepton and hadron interactions. To address these issues, neutrino events can be reconstructed directly from pixel map images of interactions in detectors with deep learning algorithms. In this talk, I will also discuss how we apply deep learning methods to reconstruct neutrino events in NOvA and DUNE.
Host: 
Kevork Abazajian
Tim Tait