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Persistent URL http://purl.org/net/epubs/work/29679
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Record Id 29679
Title A Study of Parameter Measurement in a Long-Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Experiment
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Abstract This thesis presents a study of the capability of the proposed MINOS long-baseline neutrino experiment to measure the neutrino mixing parameters, if oscillations are assumed to occur with the parameters suggested by the results of atmospheric neutrino experiments. It is shown that the observation of a neutrino energy dependent suppression of nu(mu) events in MINOS could provide a measurement of the mixing parameters to greater than 10% accuracy for 0.005<Deltam(2)<0.2eV(2) if sin(2)2theta>=0.7. The performance of a putative low energy beam for MINOS has been studied and it is shown that this beam could allow neutrino oscillations to be observed in MINOS above Deltam(2)=0.002 eV(2). An independent and complementary method to measure the mixing parameters by using the energy distributions of nu(2) CC events is also presented. A test has been developed that is sensitive to nu(mu)-->nu(tau) oscillations in MINOS by searching for event topologies that are characteristic of tau leptons. The sensitivity of the test to neutrino oscillations has been evaluated for a variety of possible detector configurations of the MINOS far detector. A fine grained detector (2cm steel plates and 2cm transverse pitch) is shown to provide the greatest sensitivity; a limit of sin(2)2theta<0.2 could be set at 90% confidence at large Deltam(2) for a 20 kiloton year exposure of MINOS. A five standard deviation effect or greater could be observed if nu(mu)-->nu(tau) oscillations occur with sin(2)2theta=1 and Deltam(2)>=10(-2) eV(2). The prospects of analysing MINOS data in the framework of three-flavour neutrino oscillations have been assessed and a preliminary Monte Carlo analysis in three-generations is presented. The results of the CHOOZ reactor neutrino experiment and the solar neutrino experiments are shown to rule out the possibility of observing a large CP violating amplitude in MINOS. Finally it is shown how the future results of MINOS are complementary to other searches for neutrino oscillations.
Organisation CCLRC
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Language English (EN)
Type Details URI(s) Local file(s) Year
Thesis RAL Theses RAL-TH-1998-009. 1998. 1998