Status of the OPERA neutrino experiment

TL;DR

The OPERA experiment at Gran Sasso aims to detect tau neutrino appearance from muon neutrino oscillations over 730 km, with recent data analysis confirming detector readiness and ongoing event reconstruction.

Contribution

This paper provides an updated status report on the OPERA experiment's data collection, detector performance, and analysis progress in observing neutrino oscillations.

Findings

Detector and emulsion facilities are fully operational.

Initial data analysis confirms successful event reconstruction.

Ongoing analysis of neutrino events for tau appearance.

Abstract

The OPERA long-baseline oscillation experiment is located in the underground Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy. OPERA has been designed to observe nu-mu -> nu-tau appearance in the CNGS nu-mu beam, 730 km away from its source at CERN. The apparatus consists of a large set of emulsion-lead targets combined with electronic detectors. First runs in 2007 and 2008 helped checking that detector and related emulsion facilities are fully operational and led to successful first analysis of collected data. The talk, after a short description of the OPERA setup, will present an updated status report on data reconstruction and analysis applied to present samples of neutrino events.