The NOvA Experiment: Status and Outlook

TL;DR

The NOvA experiment is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation project using an upgraded neutrino source and a large detector to measure neutrino properties with high precision, aiming to explore fundamental neutrino parameters.

Contribution

This paper provides an overview of NOvA's experimental setup, construction status, and its potential to measure key neutrino oscillation parameters with improved sensitivity.

Findings

NOvA will measure /-bar appearance and /-bar disappearance.

The experiment aims to constrain 3, 3, |m^2_{atm}|, the mass hierarchy, and CP violation.

Sensitivity updates incorporate latest 3 measurements.

Abstract

The NOvA long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment is currently under construction and will use an upgraded NuMI neutrino source at Fermilab and a 14-kton detector at Ash River, Minnesota to explore the neutrino sector. NOvA uses a highly active, finely segmented detector design that offers superb event identification capability, allowing precision measurements of \nu_e/\nu_e-bar appearance and \nu_\mu/\nu_\mu-bar disappearance, through which NOvA will provide constraints on \theta_13, \theta_23, |\Delta m^2_atm|, the neutrino mass hierarchy, and the CP-violating phase \delta. In this article, we review NOvA's uniquely broad physics scope, including sensitivity updates in light of the latest knowledge of \theta_13, and we discuss the experiment's construction and operation timeline.