Wednesday 24 October 2018
Speaker:  Chris Backhouse (UCL)
Title:  "First neutrino and antineutrino results for NOvA"


The phenomenon of neutrino oscillations, which implies that neutrinos are not massless as we had 
previously believed, raises a wealth of new and intriguing questions. What is the ordering of the 
neutrino mass states? Might neutrino oscillations violate matter/antimatter symmetry? 
What structure, if any, does the neutrino mixing matrix have? The NOvA experiment directly addresses 
these questions by measuring the changes undergone by a powerful neutrino beam over an 810 km baseline, 
from its source at Fermilab, Illinois to a huge 14 kton detector in Ash River, Minnesota. I will give 
a brief overview of neutrino oscillations, then present the latest NOvA results, the first to use both 
neutrino and antineutrino data samples, before discussing the implications and prospects for the future.