Search for Sterile Neutrino at MINOS using Antineutrino Disappearance

Abstract

Experimental Neutrino Physics is an active area of research in high energy physics. The investigation of the properties of this elusive particles has started since it’s discovery itself. In the standard model of particle physics, neutrinos are massless, the discovery of neutrino oscillation is the first evidence that demands the extensions of standard model. It is well established the existence of three active neutrinos, e, μ and , but recent experiments like LSND and MiniBooNE has found some anomalies in their data. These experimental data could not be explained using three flavour neutrino oscillation physics, but they could explain the anomaly by adding a fourth type neutrino called sterile neutrinos. The evidences obtained from these experiments are not yet conclusive. Search for sterile neutrino is an extensive research area in the field of neutrino physics. The main work presented in this thesis is a sterile neutrino search at MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) experiment at Fermilab, USA. MINOS is a two detector experiment at Fermilab, which studies the neutrinos produced at Fermilab Main Injector particle accelerator. MINOS Near Detector is situated at 1 km away from the source and the Far Detector is at Soudan Mine at Minnesota, 735 km away from the neutrino source. The experiment is built to study neutrino oscillation phenomena in the atmospheric sector and has made world class measurements on neutrino oscillation parameters. The MINOS experiment is also capable of looking for small perturbation in the energy spectra caused by any fourth type of neutrino and can extract the oscillation parameters.