Category: Neutrino News

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.