Event

Neutrinos are the most abundant type of fermion that we know exists, yet we do not understand basic properties of these particles like their masses. Since neutrinos are unaffected by strong and electromagnetic forces, they hardly interact with normal matter and we must construct enormous detectors to measure them at all.   Despite such challenges, these enigmatic particles have played a crucial role in the development of the universe as we know it. Much of our understanding of neutrinos comes from neutrino oscillation experiments, in which neutrinos created in one weak-interaction eigenstate change to another via a quantum mechanical interference effect. Future high-precision measurements of oscillation phenomena in detectors with Argon targets will yield the neutrino mass ordering and leptonic CP structure. The latter is important for understanding the matter-anti-matter asymmetry of the universe.  These measurements depend on our ability to accurately reconstruct the neutrino energy in our detectors. Our group focuses on the biggest challenge to neutrino energy reconstruction - neutrons in the final state. We recently made the first measurement of the neutron cross section on Argon above 100 MeV. I will describe our current understanding of neutrinos, discuss the next steps for exploring their properties, and report on the efforts we are making to advance our understanding of these most fundamental constituents of matter.