Talk:MINOS+

Improvement ideas...

The article is pretty rough. Certainly, detailed citations are required. One fairly important thing that's not clear, and I'm trying to figure out where to insert the explanation of, is that during the MINOS experiment, the NuMI beam was dedicated to MINOS. During NOνA, the beam is dedicated to NOνA. MINOS+ is a proposal to continue operating MINOS with the NOνA neutrino beam.

Also, the bit about the disadvantages of an off-axis beam needs clarification. They wouldn't have built NOνA if there weren't significant advantages. But I haven't read the sources to understand the issues yet. 71.41.210.146 (talk) 17:20, 27 November 2016 (UTC)

For your first point, put it in the Relationship with NOνA section? Remember that the operation of NOνA didn't affect the neutrinos seen by MINOS+, other than the energy of the NuMI beam and the type of neutrinos produced was dicated by the phyics NOνA required. The MINERνA expriment interated with neutrinos directly in-line with the MINOS expriment, so affected the neutrinos seen by MINOS.

The disadvantage of the off axis beam is that there are fewer neutrinos seen. However there are more neutrinos seen at a particular energy. The angle chosen for NOνA was to make it so the peak energy of the neutrinos detected would sit at the first oscillation minima. As MINOS sat in-line, it saw less neutrinos at the oscillation minima but saw more neutrinos overall energies, so could report on the stability of the NuMI beam. This meant that the NOνA collaboration could Monte Carlo the expected number of neutrinos they would see if no oscillation better.

Also I see that you've change to say that it was a continuation of the MINOS expriment rather than MINOS detectors. I would disagree with this wording, as the collabortation working on MINOS+ were a different collaboration than the one that worked on MINOS. Some people were the same but they had to apply to be part of the MINOS+ expriment. Also funding had to be raise seperatly from funding for MINOS. So used the same detectors yes, same expriment no. Dja1979 (talk) 21:19, 27 November 2016 (UTC)

@Dja1979: Thanks. I see your point about different statistics (that's actually fairly obvious), but the point the article was trying to make seemed stronger, and your explanation hasn't fully unconfused me. And thank you for your clarification about the detector vs. experiment. Much better wording! 71.41.210.146 (talk) 04:26, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

With neutrinos it's all a numbers game, so more neutrinos is more neutrinos. However, you are right it also matters where these neutrinos are and also where they are not. The main goal for the NOνA experiment is to look for ν_e appearance. To look for these they are looking for particles that look like an electron in the far detector. To produce an electron the neutrino needs to undergo a charged current interaction. From the energy seen in the detector, they can say how much energy the original neutrino had. However, the neutrino may interact via the neutral current (NC), in which case some of the energy is carried off by the neutrino, so the detector doesn't see all the energy of the neutrino. To find it's original energy is therefore harder. So if you have neutrinos at higher energy, some of these higher energy NC interaction leak into your signal sample because they look like they have lower energy. In the NOνA experiment there are fewer high energy neutrinos so fewer background events (the same argument can be made for ν_μ disappearance as well). Dja1979 (talk) 06:03, 28 November 2016 (UTC)