Speaker
Joshua Albert
(Duke University)
Description
The T2K experiment is designed to study neutrino oscillation. In particular, it is designed to measure the final, previously unmeasured oscillation mixing angle, known as theta_13. This mixing angle is responsible for allowing muon neutrinos to oscillate to electron neutrinos. T2K features a nearly pure beam of muon neutrinos, produced at the J-PARC accelerator complex in Tokai, on the East coast of Japan. This beam travels 295 km through the earth, and emerges at the Super-Kamiokande detector, in the mountains in Western Japan, where the neutrinos are detected. At this far detector, the appearance of electron neutrinos from the nu_mu beam can indicate non-zero theta_13. Six electron neutrino candidate events were observed at Super-Kamiokande, with an expected background of 1.5. The probability of observing six or more events from just background is just 0.7%.
