Study of Neutrino Oscillations in the NOvA Experiment

Abstract

NOvA is a neutrino experiment deployed at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL, USA) and designed for studying oscillations-namely, the appearance of electron neutrinos and the survival of muon neutrinos. Two detectors, a near and a far one, are separated by a distance of 810 km and are positioned at an angle of 14 mrad with respect to the axis of a beam from the NuMI accelerator complex. This configuration provides an optimum relationship between the energy and distance for neutrino oscillations. The experiment is aimed at measuring the neutrino mass hierarchy, determining the phase of CP violation in the lepton sector, and refining value of the parameters θ 23 and Δm 2 32 , as well as at performing some other tasks. The results of the NOvA analysis performed jointly for a 8.85 × 10 20 protonon-target (POT) neutrino beam and a 12.33 × 10 20 POT antineutrino beams are discussed. Also, further prospects of the experiment are outlined.