Events at Physics |
Events on Tuesday, June 30th, 2026
- NPAC (Nuclear/Particle/Astro/Cosmo) Forum
- Searching for Sterile Neutrinos with KM3NeT/ORCA
- Time: 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
- Place: WIPAC supernova
- Speaker: Rogan Clark, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
- Abstract: Since the late 1990's, a number of experiments have reported results that deviate from the standard model picture of neutrino oscillation, suggesting the presence of a 4th neutrino state with large mass splitting of ~ 1eV2. These results have been contradicted by other experiments, which place upper bounds on the existence of a potential fourth neutrino that conflict with the allowed phase space of the first group. KM3NeT/ORCA is a water cherenkov neutrino detector under construction in the Mediterranean Sea, which is optimised to detect oscillations of atmospheric neutrinos at O(10 GeV). This can be used to search for oscillations into sterile neutrinos, and thus provides another pathway to determining their existence, or lack thereof. The latest search for sterile neutrinos, using the latest ORCA dataset comprising 1.4 Mton-yr of data, will be reported and the future for sterile neutrino searches discussed.
- Host: Lu Lu