ARNU · The Impact of Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions on DUNE's CP-Violation Measurement
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2020-10-01 → 2022-09-30
- EU contribution
- €212,934
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
The Impact of Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions on DUNE's CP-Violation Measurement
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) will aim to discover if neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts, antineutrinos, oscillate in the same way. If this is found not to be the case, it may help to explain why we live in a matter dominated Universe, and indeed how we can exist at all. In order to make this measurement, an intense, accelerator produced beam of neutrinos will be made at Fermilab (near Chicago, USA) and then sent 1300 km through the Earth to massive underground neutrino detectors in Lead, South Dakota. Along the way the neutrino beam is also characterised by a complex of "near" neutrino detectors close to the beam production point. The DUNE detectors use a novel liquid argon time projector chamber technology, allowing high resolution imaging of the neutrino interactions. The overall objectives of this project are to understand how the differences between neutrino and antineutrino interactions with the matter nuclei in our detectors may impact our ability to measure differences in neutrino oscillations, and to improve our understanding of the detector technologies involved, using data from the test beam of the DUNE prototype, ProtoDUNE.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The question of why matter is able to exist in abundance in our Universe is one of the most exciting open questions in physics today. One possible source of a matter-antimatter asymmetry is an as yet undiscovered difference between neutrino and antineutrino oscillations (CP-violation). DUNE is a next generation long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment that aims to discover CP-violation in neutrino oscillations for the first time. An intense accelerator (anti)neutrino beam from Fermilab will be directed at far detectors 1300 km away. In order to observe this difference, the experiment must contend with the fact that our planet and detectors are made of matter and not antimatter. Any differences between the way neutrinos and antineutrinos interact with atomic matter must therefore be well understood in order to disentangle these differences from CP-violation in the neutrino oscillations themselves.In this action I will work to reduce the systematic errors on DUNE's CP-violation measurement caused by uncertainties in our understanding of neutrino-nucleus interactions. The work will be centered around DUNE's currently operating prototype detectors. This work is essential to conduct now since DUNE will use argon as its neutrino interaction target nucleus, resulting in more complex nuclear effects than experienced by the current generation of long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments, which use lighter nuclei. In particular I will simulate the effects of different nuclear models on the interaction probabilities for neutrinos and antineutrinos and apply new analysis techniques to better distinguish between different nuclear models, ultimately improving DUNE's sensitivity to CP-violation in neutrino oscillations.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- IMPERIAL COLLEGE OF SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE · LondonCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union