4 Neutrino Oscillation ExperimentsFaculty: Gary Feldman; Postdocs: Mayly Sanchez; Graduate students: Andre Lebedev,Sharon Seun; Engineers: Nathan Felt, John Oliver.Contents4 Neutrino Oscillation Experiments 14.1 The MINOS Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34.1.1 Goals of the Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34.1.2 Overview of MINOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34.1.3 MINOS Physics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74.2 Harvard Contributions to MINOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104.3 Far Detector Electronics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154.3.1 System Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154.3.2 VA Characteristics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174.3.3 Electronics Production and Installation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224.4 Development of Event Reconstruction Code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244.4.1 Kalman Filter Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244.4.2 Calibration Using Cosmic Muons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324.4.3 Transition to Object-Oriented Code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334.5 Reconstruction and Offline Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 364.5.1 Track Reconstruction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 394.5.2 Upward Going Muon Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 404.5.3 Contained Event Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 474.6 νµ→ νeAnalysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 534.7 The MIPP Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 534.7.1 Hadron production uncertainties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 544.7.2 The MIPP Experiment for MINOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 544.7.3 The MIPP Layout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 592 Section 4: Neutrino Oscillation Experiments4.7.4 Harvard Responsibilities in the MIPP Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . 594.7.5 The RICH Detector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 634.7.6 RICH Reconstruction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 634.7.7 TPC Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 654.7.8 MIPP Data Acquisition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 694.8 The Off-Axis Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 714.8.1 Off-Axis Technology Choices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 714.8.2 Off-Axis Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 734.8.3 Off-Axis Schedule . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 744.9 NOMAD Collaboration Publications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75Section 4: Neutrino Oscillation Experiments 3The current activities of the neutrino oscillation group is the preparation of the MINOSexperiment, a subsidiary experiment, MIPP, which will measure the hadron production fromthe MINOS target in a way that will be directly applicable to the MINOS analysis, and theOff-Axis experiment, which will go beyond MINOS in its ability to measure the currentlyunknown neutrino parameters.The group’s previous experiment was NOMAD. We will not report on it here sinceHarvard contributions to it have been reported in previous reports and there is very littlegroup activity in that experiment now. However, there are still papers coming from NOMAD,and we will present a list of all NOMAD publications at the end of this chapter.Of the two previous postdocs in the group, Mark Messier assumed a junior faculty positionat Indiana University last fall and Roy Lee recently left the group to take a staff position atMIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. Mayly Sanchez has recently joined the group as a postdoc. Shedid a doctoral thesis at Tufts University on Soudan II atmospheric neutrino oscillations.4.1 The MINOS Experiment4.1.1 Goals of the ExperimentThe recent atmospheric neutrino results [1] almost certainly guarantee that neutrino oscil-lations exist in the ∆m2region of 10−2to 10−3(eV/c2)2and at large values of sin22θ. Thegoals of the MINOS experiment are to verify the atmospheric neutrino results, to measurethe ∆m2value or values precisely, and to determine the extent to which muon-type neutrinososcillate into τ -type neutrinos, electron-type neutrinos, and sterile neutrinos.4.1.2 Overview of MINOSThe best description of the …