The Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment uses an acceleratorproduced neutrino beam to perform precision measurements of the neutrino oscillation parameters in the "atmospheric neutrino" sector associated with muon neutrino disappearance. This long-baseline experiment measures neutrino interactions in Fermilab's NuMI neutrino beam with a near detector at Fermilab and again 735 km downstream with a far detector in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in northern Minnesota. The two detectors are magnetized steel-scintillator tracking calorimeters. They are designed to be as similar as possible in order to ensure that differences in detector response have minimal impact on the comparisons of event rates, energy spectra and topologies that are essential to MINOS measurements of oscillation parameters. The design, construction, calibration and performance of the far and near detectors are described in this paper.

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This Letter reports new results from the MINOS experiment based on a two-year exposure to muon neutrinos from the Fermilab NuMI beam. Our data are consistent with quantum-mechanical oscillations of neutrino flavor with mass splitting |Deltam2| = (2.43+/-0.13) x 10(-3) eV2 (68% C.L.) and mixing angle sin2(2theta) > 0.90 (90% C.L.). Our data disfavor two alternative explanations for the disappearance of neutrinos in flight: namely, neutrino decays into lighter particles and quantum decoherence of neutrinos, at the 3.7 and 5.7 standard-deviation levels, respectively.

The velocity of a ∼3 GeV neutrino beam is measured by comparing detection times at the Near and Far detectors of the MINOS experiment, separated by 734 km. A total of 473 Far Detector neutrino events was used to measure (v − c)/c = 5.1 ± 2.9 × 10 −5 (at 68% C.L.). By correlating the measured energies of 258 charged-current neutrino events to their arrival times at the Far Detector, a limit is imposed on the neutrino mass of mν < 50 MeV/c 2 (99% C.L.).