Designing a 3.8-GeV/c muon-decay ring and experiment sensitive to electronvolt-scale sterile neutrinos

Thesis

The liquid-scintillator neutrino-detector (LSND) and mini booster neutrino experiment (MiniBooNE) experiments claim to observe the oscillation ῡ_µ→ ῡ_e, which can only be explained by additional neutrinos and is a claim that must be further tested. This thesis proposes a new accelerator and experiment called νSTORM to refute or confirm the oscillation these claims by studying the CPT-equivalent channel ν_e→ν_µ. A 3.8-GeV/c muon decay ring is proposed with neutrino detectors placed 20 m and 2000 m from the decay ring. The detector technology would be a magnetized iron sampling calorimeter, where the magnetic field is induced by a superconducting transmission line. In a frequentist study, the sensitivity of this experiment after 5 years would be >10σ. The range of the thesis discussion starts with the proton front-end design and ends with neutrino parameter estimation. After describing the phenomenology of sterile neutrinos, the facility and detector performance work is presented. Finally, the systematics are explained before the sensitivity and parameter-estimation works are explained.

Authors: Tunnell, CD

• Publication date: 2013
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-xkpbqa4o1
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: nuSTORM; sterile neutrino; neutrino factory
• Subjects: Particle physics