Discovery of tau neutrino appearance in the CNGS neutrino beam with the OPERA experiment

Abstract

The OPERA experiment was designed to search for ${\nu }_{\mu }\to {\nu }_{\tau }$ oscillations in appearance mode, i.e. by detecting the $\tau$-leptons produced in charged current ${\nu }_{\tau }$ interactions. The experiment took data from 2008 to 2012 in the CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso beam. The observation of ${\nu }_{\mu }\to {\nu }_{\tau }$ appearance, achieved with four candidate events in a sub-sample of the data, was previously reported. In this paper, a fifth ${\nu }_{\tau }$ candidate event, found in an enlarged data sample, is described. Together with a further reduction of the expected background, the candidate events detected so far allow assessing the discovery of ${\nu }_{\mu }\to {\nu }_{\tau }$ oscillations in appearance mode with a significance larger than 5 $\sigma$.

7 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Measurement of Neutrino Oscillation by the K2K Experiment
• Measurement of the neutrino mass splitting and flavor mixing by MINOS
• Observation of a first ${\nu }_{\tau }$ candidate in the OPERA experiment in the CNGS beam
• A Measurement of Atmospheric Neutrino Flux Consistent with Tau Neutrino Appearance
• The OPERA experiment Target Tracker
• Observation of nu_tau appearance in the CNGS beam with the OPERA experiment
• Procedure for short-lived particle detection in the OPERA experiment and its application to charm decays
• Automatic track recognition for large-angle minimum ionizing particles in nuclear emulsions

Cited by in corpus (47)

• Current unknowns in the three neutrino framework
• A review of mu-tau flavor symmetry in neutrino physics
• Detecting and Studying High-Energy Collider Neutrinos with FASER at the LHC
• Global Constraints on a Heavy Neutrino
• Unitarity and the three flavour neutrino mixing matrix
• Solar structure and evolution
• Final results of the OPERA experiment on ${\nu }_{\tau }$ appearance in the CNGS beam
• Determining the Neutrino Mass Ordering and Oscillation Parameters with KM3NeT/ORCA
• Search for active-sterile neutrino mixing using neutral-current interactions in NOvA
• Physics with Beam Tau-Neutrino Appearance at DUNE
• PINGU: A Vision for Neutrino and Particle Physics at the South Pole
• Hyper-track selector nuclear emulsion readout system aimed at scanning an area of one thousand square meters
• Neutrino oscillations: the rise of the PMNS paradigm
• A Measurement of the Tau Neutrino Cross Section in Atmospheric Neutrino Oscillations with Super-Kamiokande
• Tau Neutrinos in the Next Decade: from GeV to EeV
• Physics Potential of an Experiment using LHC Neutrinos
• First measurement of ${\bar{\nu }}_{\mu }$ and ${\nu }_{\mu }$ charged-current inclusive interactions on water using a nuclear emulsion detector
• Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiments
• Embedded Readout Electronics R&D for the Large PMTs in the JUNO Experiment
• Final results on neutrino oscillation parameters from the OPERA experiment in the CNGS beam
• Further studies on the physics potential of an experiment using LHC neutrinos
• Quasielastic production of polarized $\tau$ leptons in ${\nu }_{\tau }$ and ${\bar{\nu }}_{\tau }$ scattering from nucleons
• Measurement of the cosmic ray muon flux seasonal variation with the OPERA detector
• Neutrino Oscillations with MINOS and MINOS+
• Probing new charged scalars with neutrino trident production
• Topological track reconstruction in unsegmented, large-volume liquid scintillator detectors
• The science and technology of liquid argon detectors
• A View of Neutrino Studies with the Next Generation Facilities
• Empirical inference on the Majorana mass of the ordinary neutrinos
• First neutrino event detection with nuclear emulsion at J-PARC neutrino beamline
• Nonperturbative and higher order perturbative effects in deep inelastic ${\nu }_{\tau }/{\bar{\nu }}_{\tau }-$nucleon scattering
• The importance of observing astrophysical tau neutrinos
• Enhanced tau neutrino appearance through invisible decay
• Dual-Baseline Search for Active-to-Sterile Neutrino Oscillations in NOvA
• Wide angle acceptance and high-speed track recognition in nuclear emulsion
• Hyperon production in quasielastic ${\bar{\nu }}_{\tau }-$nucleon scattering
• Accurate GPS-based timestamp facility for Gran Sasso National Laboratory
• First observation of a tau neutrino charged current interaction with charm production in the Opera experiment
• New Signal of Atmospheric Tau Neutrino Appearance: Sub-GeV Neutral-Current Interactions in JUNO
• The SHiP experiment and the RPC technology
• Summary and Outlook: 2015 Lepton-Photon Symposium
• Search for active-sterile antineutrino mixing using neutral-current interactions with the NOvA experiment
• Search for Sterile Neutrinos at OPERA and other Long--Baseline Experiments
• Novel tracking approach based on fully-unsupervised disentanglement of the geometrical factors of variation
• Investigation of the neutron imaging applications using fine-grained nuclear emulsion
• Neutrino Oscillations in the Three Flavor Paradigm
• Study of Proton-Nucleus Interactions in the DsTau/NA65 Experiment at the CERN-SPS