Author: Kevin McFarland

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New work on Radiative Corrections to Neutrino Scattering

Postdoc Clarence Wret and Professor Kevin McFarland have been collaborating with colleagues from Fermilab, Los Alamos, and the University of Kentucky to study the effects of electromagnetic radiative corrections on neutrino interactions. The work has recently resulted in one long and one short paper which are currently in journal review.

One main conclusion from the work is that it appears that radiative corrections, while different in electron neutrino and muon neutrino reactions, don’t change the predicted cross-section ratio in such a way as to violate current assumptions. However, some of the neutrino energy going to additional energetic photons may require corrections to some oscillation analyses.

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Dr. Aaron Bercellie

Aaron Bercellie completed and defended his thesis, “Muon Neutrino Charged Current Single Pion Production on Various Targets in the MINERvA Detector” in April 2022. The paper describing his results is in internal review and will appear on the arXiv soon.

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Electron Neutrinos at ICARUS

The ICARUS experiment, currently in commissioning, has observed electron neutrino candidates from the NuMI beamline. Graduate student Ryan Howell found this candidate event while scanning data. A projection roughly transverse to the beam at top right (“H view”) shows an electron shower to the left recoiling against a track which is likely a proton or charged pion. The two tracks overlap in the perpendicular view at the bottom right (“U view”).

The NuMI beam at ICARUS has a large fraction of electron neutrinos because it views the beam at an angle. Electron neutrino searches in the “on axis” booster neutrino beam are a key element of ICARUS’s physics program.

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Dr. Tejin Cai

Dr. Tejin Cai successfully defended his thesis which provides the first precise measurement of the nucleon axial form factor without nuclear effects from his measurement of anti neutrino scattering on hydrogen. Tejin will begin a postdoctoral fellowship at York University in Toronto this summer.

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Remembering Masatoshi Koshiba

Masatoshi Koshiba (1955 Ph.D., University of Rochester), who received the Nobel Prize in 2002 for the observation of neutrinos from SuperNova 1987a, passed away this week. We owe him so much for the impact that his work had on opening up the study of neutrinos. There are lovely remembrances on the University of Rochester News Page and in the New York Times. Some of us were fortunate enough to meet with him on his last visit to Rochester in 2000 when he received the Distinguished Scholar Award of the University. True to form, he gave us a lecture in that visit about his ideas for a nearly one million ton neutrino detector which is today moving toward reality as the Hyper-Kamiokande experiment.

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Dr. Rob Fine

Rob successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis, “Measurement of the Medium Energy NuMI Flux Using the Low-ν and High-ν Methods at MINERvA” today. Rumor has it that a bottle of champagne was successfully delivered to Rob at Fermilab in the conference room where he defended over Zoom by his proud advisor, Kevin McFarland.

Rob will be working as a postdoctoral fellow in Sowjanya Gollapinni’s group at Los Alamos on SBND and MicroBooNE.

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Dan Ruterbories Awarded Cottrell Fellowship

Dr. Dan Ruterbories has been awarded a Cottrell Fellowship from the Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement recognizing his work on MINERvA. Dan serves as MINERvA’s analysis coordinator, and studies quasielastic scattering and related processes with the goal of understanding how the nuclear environment affects the energy observed after the neutrino interacts. As part of the Fellowship, Dan will be supported to teach the “self-paced” Physics 113 course in Spring 2021. This course serves students whose background puts them at risk of difficulties in this course required for pre-Med students and life sciences majors, and provides extra support in a “flipped classroom” environment to help them to succeed.

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Tejin Cai awarded Messersmith Fellowship

Tejin Cai has been selected as an Agnes M. and George Messersmith Fellow. This award will support his final year of his Ph.D. dissertation work at Rochester. Tejin was selected from among all the Ph.D. students in physics, chemistry, biology, and preclinical departments of the School of Medicine and Dentistry. He recently published work demonstrating a novel technique for measuring the removal energy for neutrons in neutrino scattering in carbon.

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Neutrinos used to measure binding of Nucleons in Nucleus

Building on ideas from previous work by PhD student Tejin Cai and Professor Arie Bodek, and experimental techniques from Postdoctoral fellow Dan Ruterbories, Tejin has shown that transverse kinematic imbalance in the reaction plane is sensitive to nuclear binding. “Nucleon binding energy and transverse momentum imbalance in neutrino-nucleus reactions”, T. Cai et al [MINERvA Collaboration], Phys. Rev. D 101, 092001.