MINOS+ was a continuation of the

MINOS In Greek mythology, Minos (; grc-gre, Μίνως, ) was a King of Crete, son of Zeus and Europa. Every nine years, he made King Aegeus pick seven young boys and seven young girls to be sent to Daedalus's creation, the labyrinth, to be eaten ...

experiment (Main injector neutrino oscillation search) to measure neutrino oscillation with improved electronics. It started taking data in 2013 and ran for 3 years. The experiment has ended and a 6-month dismantling project began in early October 2016.

Physics Goals

*Measure sin²2''θ'' and Δ''m''² with higher precision. *Measure sin²2 and Δ² with higher precision. *Study high energy neutrinos *Search for sterile neutrinos *Search for tau neutrinos *Non-standard interactions *Measurement of the neutrino time of flight *Search for extra dimensions *Atmospheric neutrinos

Neutrino Beam

MINOS+ uses the

NuMI Neutrinos at the Main Injector, or NuMI, is a project at Fermilab which creates an intense beam of neutrinos aimed towards the Far Detector facility near Ash River, Minnesota for use by several particle detectors. , the MINOS, MINERνA and NOνA ...

beamline In accelerator physics, a beamline refers to the trajectory of the beam of particles, including the overall construction of the path segment (guide tubes, diagnostic devices) along a specific path of an accelerator facility. This part is either ...

generated at

Fermilab Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Since 2007, Fermilab has been oper ...

. To produce the beamline, 120 GeV proton pulses from the Main Injector hit a water-cooled graphite target. The resulting interactions of protons with the target material produce

pion In particle physics, a pion (or a pi meson, denoted with the Greek letter pi: ) is any of three subatomic particles: , , and . Each pion consists of a quark and an antiquark and is therefore a meson. Pions are the lightest mesons and, more gene ...

s and

kaon KAON (Karlsruhe ontology) is an ontology infrastructure developed by the University of Karlsruhe and the Research Center for Information Technologies in Karlsruhe. Its first incarnation was developed in 2002 and supported an enhanced version of ...

s, which are focused by a system of magnetic horns. These then travel down a long decay tunnel, and their decay produces a neutrino beam parallel to the meson beam. Most of these are muon neutrinos, with a small electron neutrino contamination. Neutrino interactions in the near detector are used to measure the initial neutrino flux and energy spectrum. Because they are weakly interacting and therefore usually pass through matter, the vast majority of the neutrinos travel through the near detector and the 734 km of rock, then through the far detector and off into space. For the initial 3-year run the NuMI beam will be in its medium energy configuration which will deliver the majority of neutrinos with an energy between 4 GeV and 10 GeV.

Relationship with NOνA

NOνA sits 14

milliradian A milliradian ( SI-symbol mrad, sometimes also abbreviated mil) is an SI derived unit for angular measurement which is defined as a thousandth of a radian (0.001 radian). Milliradians are used in adjustment of firearm sights by adjusting t ...

s off the central line of the NuMI beam. At this angle, there is an enhancement of neutrinos with an energy of 2 GeV, at which the ''L''/''E'' (baseline divided by energy) maximizes the oscillation of muon neutrinos. This causes a problem in that the signal you are looking for is a dip in a peak. MINOS+ sits on the central line of the beam so the full beam make up is seen, thus helping control systematic errors for the NuMI beam energy.

References

External Links

MINOS+ experiment
record on

INSPIRE-HEP INSPIRE-HEP is an open access digital library for the field of high energy physics (HEP). It is the successor of the Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System (SPIRES) database, the main literature database for high energy physics since the 19 ...

{{Neutrino detectors Accelerator neutrino experiments Fermilab Particle experiments Neutrino experiments Fermilab experiments