Current Work
Analysis Working Groups
The group has a strong presence in MINOS analyses, including:
- Very large involvement in the charged current working group, responsible for the experiment's most important measurement: muon neutrino disappearance between the Near and Far Detectors.
- Event identification and the analysis of interaction rates, energy spectra and kinematic distributions derived from Near Detector data. The effort is focused on validating the event reconstruction techniques and the experiment's understanding of the neutrino beam.
- Electron neutrino identification and background systematics studies in the Near and Far Detectors as part of muon neutrino to electron neutrino oscillation analysis.
- Muon calibration of the Near Detector.
- Analysis of the muon antineutrino component of the beam to make the first direct comparison of the neutrino and antineutrino oscillation parameters.
- Vital improvements to the Main Injector, the proton accelerator that produces MINOS's neutrino beam.
The group also has responsibility for analysis and application of data collected with the MINOS calibration detector (CalDet). The CalDet program is described below.
The Calibration Detector (CalDet) was a small (12 tonnes) model of the MINOS Near and Far detectors that was exposed to test beams in the CERN PS East Hall during several runs in 2001-03. The data were collected in order to:
- Determine the response of the MINOS detectors to electrons, muons and hadrons. The response must be known before MINOS can measure the energy of neutrinos.
- Provide a series of benchmarks for comparison with and tuning of Monte Carlo simulations. Topological quantities are particularly important since MINOS will use event shape to identify electron charged current, muon charged current and neutral current events.
- Develop and implement the experiment's calibration procedure.
- Compare the different electronics used in the Near and Far detectors.
Ongoing work, much of which is done at UCL, is focused on the analysis of the data and applications to the Near and Far Detectors, especially in the context of CalDet data being a database of specific events - for example electrons, muons, pions - that we can study in more detail.
Data Acquisition Software
Gordon Crone is responsible for the Branch Readout Processor software
and various other online tasks.
Past Work
Soudan Mine
MINOS students spent several months working on general detector installation tasks in the Soudan Mine in Minnesota.
Development of Light Injection Calibration system
The MINOS LI calibration system was designed at Sussex based on
extensive R&D work at UCL and Sussex.
Evaluation of Hamamatsu M16 and M64 phototubes
During the R&D phase of the experiment the group constructed and operated an apparatus that was used to characterise a pre-production sample of Hamamatsu M16 and M64 multianode photomultipliers. These devices are now employed in the MINOS Far and Near Detectors.
