Weak Interaction Discussion Group (WIDG) Seminar: Serhan Tufanli, Yale University, “Discovery of tau neutrino appearance with the OPERA experiment”

Tuesday Nov 10, 2015, 12:00 PM → 1:00 PM US/Eastern

WLC 108

OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion tRacking Apparatus) is a long-baseline neutrino experiment, designed to perform the first direct detection of muon neutrino to tau neutrino oscillations in appearance mode. The apparatus, consisted of a large set of emulsion-lead targets combined with electronic detectors, was conceived to select tau neutrino charged current interactions through the observation of outcoming tau combined with electronic detectors, was conceived to select tau neutrino charged current interactions through the observation of outcoming tau leptons and their subsequent decays. The experiment took data from 2008 to 2012 in the CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso beam. Five candidate events have been detected in the analyzed data sample, assessing the discovery of muon to tau neutrino oscillations in appearance mode with a significance larger than 5 sigma. In this talk, I will give an overview of the OPERA experiment and I will discuss its latest results.

Tufanli_WIDG_Seminar_11102015.pdf