Search for Electron Neutrino Appearance in MINOS

TL;DR

This paper reports on the MINOS experiment's search for electron neutrino appearance, using improved analysis techniques to better identify $ u_e$ events and measure neutrino oscillations over a 735 km baseline.

Contribution

It introduces upgraded event identification and fitting methods to enhance sensitivity in detecting $ u_e$ appearance in the MINOS experiment.

Findings

Enhanced sensitivity to $ u_e$ appearance.

Refined background estimation methods.

Latest results on neutrino oscillation parameters.

Abstract

The MINOS Collaboration continues its search for $\nu_e$ appearance in the NuMI (Neutrinos at the Main Injector) beam at Fermilab. Neutrinos in the beam interact in the Near Detector, located 1 km from the beam source, allowing us to characterize the backgrounds present in our analysis. In particular, we can estimate the number of $\nu_e$ candidate events we expect to see in the Far Detector (735 km away, in the Soudan mine in northern Minnesota) in the presence or absence of $\nu_\mu \rightarrow \nu_e$ oscillation. Recent efforts to improve the sensitivity of the analysis, including upgrades to the event identification algorithm and fitting procedure, are discussed, and the latest results from the search are presented.