Minutes from July 8 Meeting

There were a few people at today's meeting who were also at NuFact02 : Steve Geer, Jorge Morfin, and Debbie Harris, and we gave our impressions. Steve pointed out that enthusiasm for doing R&D on a neutrino factory was still high, despite the severe reduction in funding, and that plans for future measurements were going on. Actually, the UK is particularly supportive of neutrino factory r&d, as is evidenced by their encouragement for the MICE experiment (which could happen at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory). It looks like the UK might provide up to 20% above the beamline costs for the MICE (Muon international cooling experiment) project, where the assumption is that 45% of the experiment is funded from Europe, 45% from the US, and 10% from japan. The current estimate for the MICE experiment is about 20M$.

The time scale for the MICE experiment is that the results are in by the time the LHC is up and taking data, so that people can make informed decisions about the next big project.

Jorge Morfin talked about the shift in focus of the non-oscillation working group: where before in these conferences that group was giving talks about how well various experiments could do for non-oscillation physics, this year there were lots of talks on how near detector measurements could help the superbeam oscillation measurements.

Debbie showed a few slides from the experimental summary talk for working group 2 (oscillations and detectors) (link is below): but basically the deal is that people are looking at issues of degeneracies and correlations like never before: i.e. what combination of measurements is the best to best pin down the matrix elements? Before people were just considering neutrino and antineutrino running with the same baseline and energy, but now people are considering superbeams plus neutrino factories, or numu to nue combined with nue to numu (beta beams), and finally, nue to numu combined with nue to nutau (neutrino factories on both counts).

On the subject of beta beams, there seemed to be a lot of enthusiasm by accelerator physicists about how to make one of those work, but people at the meeting agreed that the hep experimental community hasn't really been sold on their usefullness--the rates are still pretty low given the effort involved, and the beta beam doesn't appear to be a huge cost savings compared to a neutrino factory which clearly wins as far as rates are concerned.

Oscillations and Detectors Experimental Summary Talk
(warning, huge postscript file, 44Mbytes ungzipped, 23MBytes gzipped)

Finally, Debbie showed a bunch of slides that were originally shown by Olga Mena, on resolving degeneracies using two sets of measurements, one from a neutrino factory and one from the CERN spl superbeam. This can also be found now by going to the paper, which just appeared today on the los alamos archive: SUPERBEAMS PLUS NEUTRINO FACTORY: THE GOLDEN PATH TO LEPTONIC CP VIOLATION by By J. Burguet-Castell M.B. Gavela, J.J. Gomez-Cadenas , P. Hernandez , and O. Mena
Talk without plots
intrinsic theta13 delta degeneracies
theta 23 to pi/2-theta23
sign of delta m23^2

Deborah Harris

Last modified: Wed Jul 10 15:35:52 CDT 2002