In the summer of 1998, my group and I joined the Fermilab Booster
Neutrino
Experiment,
BooNE.
This is an investigation of neutrino oscillations
in the region of mass-difference and mixing angle where the LSND
experiment has seen some evidence for oscillations.
The implied mass scale of neutrinos in this region is
considerably larger
than that indicated by atmospheric and solar neutrino
measurements. It would have substantial impact on cosmology if
verified.
The initial configuration of
the experiment, "MiniBooNE," is a 40-ft-diameter tank of mineral
oil, instrumented with photomultiplier tubes and positioned 500
m from
a new 1-GeV neutrino source.
Our group was responsible for designing and fabricating the
phototube
support structure, basically everything inside the tank.
We installed this structure and the
photomultipliers
and associated cabling in the tank in the Spring and Summer of
2001.
You can view
progress in the construction
here.
In 2007, we reported our first oscillation results (see the reference below), which saw no evidence for the LSND effect.
The published analysis was the one developed by the Princeton group.
In this analysis, there was an excess of electron-like events at low energies for which there is
still no convincing explanation.
Princeton's efforts on BooNE are winding down, and I am currently most interested in persuing direct searches
for Dark Matter.
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