Colloquium: Dr. John Walker

Fri. Oct. 26 12:30 PM - Fri. Oct. 26 01:20 PM
Location: 1L06

Dr. John Walker

Post Doctoral Fellow at TRIUMF

Latest results from T2K and prospects for Hyper-Kamiokande and E61

Neutrinos are the lightest Standard Model particle, and among the least understood, but have demonstrated the potential to reveal physics beyond the Standard Model and shed light on the development of the early universe. Over the past two decades neutrino experiments have shown that neutrinos undergo flavour oscillation and have a non-zero mass.

The Tokai-to-Kamioka (T2K) long baseline neutrino experiment in Japan was designed to measure oscillation parameters to unprecedented uncertainty. A beam of muon neutrinos is generated at the J-PARC facility in Tokai, and is sampled by the ND280 and INGRID near detectors, before reaching the Super-Kamiokande experiment 295 km away.

Measurements made of the neutrino oscillation parameters have shown that with the next generation of long baseline experiments, such as the recently approved Hyper-Kamiokande (HK) experiment, it may be possible to observe CP violation.

HK will be dominated by systematic rather than statistical uncertainty. The determination of incident neutrino energy based on experimental observables relies on theoretical neutrino-nucleus interaction models, which is the dominant uncertainty for HK. E61, an intermediate water Cherenkov near detector, is an experimental solution to constrain this uncertainty.

E61 will be constructed using multi-PMT modules, that can be raised/lowered to span a 1-4 degree off-axis range. Linear combinations of the near detector flux, at different off-axis angle slices, can be taken to match the far detector flux measurement. Oscillation parameters may then be extracted while largely reducing neutrino interaction model dependence.

This talk will report the latest results from T2K as well as the prospects and statuses of the Hyper-Kamiokande and E61 experiments.