Ghosts on-shell: precision measurement, neutrino oscillations, and the quest to go Beyond the Standard Model
Jeremy Wolcott
Postdoctoral Associate
Though the neutrino as a theoretical notion has just had its 90th birthday, and the confirming experimental discovery was more than sixty years ago, neutrinos remain the most mysterious of the fundamental particles known in the Standard Model. Besides interacting with ordinary matter so rarely that supermassive detectors or extremely intense sources are required to even observe them, and being separated from the other fundamental fermions by at least six orders of magnitude in mass, the three neutrino types are “fickle,” trading places with one another through a quantum-mechanical phenomenon known as “neutrino oscillation.” But neutrino oscillations are not just a curiosity; they may also hold the potential to finally point us to where we should look beyond the current Standard Model for new theoretical insights. The discovery of an underlying symmetry in the way the neutrino states mix with one another or the way the neutrinos' masses are arranged, for instance, or the violation of symmetries between neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts, could have profound consequences for both particle physics and cosmology.
In this talk I will discuss how the road to these observations is paved with precision measurements of neutrino oscillations, and how the long-baseline neutrino oscillation program at Fermilab---consisting of the current NOvA and future DUNE experiments---is working to make them. I will discuss how we search for the disappearance of muon neutrinos and appearance of electron neutrinos from a muon neutrino beam and the current state of our measurements in NOvA. I will briefly consider the outsized role that essential model ingredients like those used for neutrino interactions with the detector play in this search. I will also report on progress towards the next-generation measurements intended for DUNE, including how we are preparing for the challenge of reconstructing complex event topologies in a high-pileup environment with an end-to-end machine learning-based approach.
ZOOM link: http://bit.ly/36YfHkG
Meeting ID: 953 096 7425
Passcode: neutri2021