Department of Physics & Astronomy
University of New Mexico

Nuclear, Particle, Astroparticle and Cosmology (NUPAC) Seminars

Searching for Sterile Neutrinos and accelerator produced Dark Matter with the Coherent CAPTAIN-Mills (CCM) Detector at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center

Presented by Richard van de Water, LANL

The MiniBooNE and LSND experiments have shown compelling evidence for
sterile neutrinos in short baseline neutrino oscillation
experiments. In these experiments, an excess of electron neutrino
appearance was observed from a pure muon neutrino beam, and if these
data are interpreted as sterile neutrino oscillations, the mass scale
is ~1 eV2. Analogous muon neutrino disappearance measurements have
shown no anomalies, but these experiments have been performed at a
different energy scale compared to LSND and MiniBooNE. Coherent
CAPTAIN-Mills (CCM) is a new experiment to search for muon neutrino
disappearance at the LSND energy scale. CCM will use a 10-ton liquid
argon scintillation detector to leverage the enhanced cross section
from coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering. CCM will operate at
the Lujan Center at LANSCE which is a 100-kW stopped pion source that
delivers an 800-MeV proton beam onto a tungsten target at 20 Hz with a
pulse width of 275 ns. This fast pulsing is crucial for isolating the
monoenergetic muon neutrino in time and reducing neutron
backgrounds. Furthermore, new vector portal dark sector models predict
beam dump experiments like CCM are sensitive to sub-GeV dark matter
production with sensitivities that probe early Universe relic density
limits. In this talk, I will describe the current state of sterile
neutrino and dark matter theories, describe the CCM detector and sensitivities, and show first results from our successful 2019 commissioning run.

2:00 pm, Tuesday, March 3, 2020
PAIS-3205, PAIS

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A schedule of talks within the Department of Physics and Astronomy is available on the P&A web site at http://physics.unm.edu/pandaweb/events/index.php