Event Description
Anne Schukraft, PhD, Fermilab
Although neutrinos are among the most abundant particles in the universe, they are also among the most mysterious: they are neutral, very light and only weakly interacting, and therefore can traverse the entire Earth, the Sun and even galaxies.
Since the discovery of the electron neutrino in 1956, three different species of neutrinos have been observed, with hints for the existence of even more so called neutrino flavors. It has not yet been possible to determine the absolute masses of neutrinos, nor their mass ordering. Another open question is the symmetry or asymmetry of the behavior of neutrinos and anti-neutrinos, which might help us understand the asymmetry of matter and antimatter in our Universe. And there is even a possibility that neutrinos are their own antiparticles. All these mysteries have the potential to uncover physics beyond the standard model of particle physics and neutrinos could be the key to a new understanding of the subatomic world.
This talk will discuss a recent newcomer to the neutrino scene, MicroBooNE. The MicroBooNE detector is a liquid argon time projection chamber, designed to observe neutrinos from the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Beam. Its main physics goals are the search for a fourth type of neutrino and the study of interactions of neutrinos with matter. At the same time, it is a prototype detector for a very large future long-baseline neutrino detector in the U.S. of the same technology that will answer some of the most pressing questions about neutrinos.
MicroBooNE started operations in summer 2015 and has just seen its first neutrinos.
MicroBooNE website: http://www-microboone.fnal.gov/
Contains news and a brief description of the detector and the physics goals of the experiment, as well as links to photo and social media pages.
M. Soderberg, MicroBooNE: A new liquid argon time projection chamber experiment. Proceedings of NuINT 2009. http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.3497 |
