NOvA — oscillations with data on the ground

Imperial College London · 2026 – present · with Dr Linda Cremonesi

My role on NOvA is a variety of physics analysis.

NOvA — NuMI Off-axis \(\nu_e\) Appearance — is the experiment that gives me data now. Where DUNE is still being built, NOvA has been running since 2014, and the analysis problems it poses are the ones that will still be there when DUNE turns on.

The apparatus. Two functionally identical liquid-scintillator tracking calorimeters sit in Fermilab’s NuMI beam: a near detector at Fermilab, and a 14 kt far detector 810 km away at Ash River, Minnesota. Both sit 14.6 mrad off the beam axis, which is the design choice that makes the experiment work — going off-axis narrows the flux into a band around 2 GeV, close to the \(\nu_\mu \rightarrow \nu_e\) oscillation maximum, and strips out the high-energy tail that would otherwise dominate the neutral-current background.

The measurements. Electron-neutrino appearance and muon-neutrino disappearance, in both neutrino and antineutrino beam modes. Together these constrain the mass ordering, the octant of \(\theta_{23}\), and \(\delta_{CP}\).

Why it matters to my work. Working across a variety of physics analyses is the fastest way to learn where an experiment’s systematics actually live — you see the same nuisance parameters surface in different measurements, which is not something you get from a single channel. My supervisor is the spokesperson of NOvA, and the group treats the two experiments as one programme rather than two. Practically, that means the reconstruction and inference methods I develop get tested against real, systematics-limited data on NOvA before they are asked to carry a DUNE measurement. That is the right order to do it in — a method that has never met a real detector is a hypothesis, not a tool.

Work in progress; outputs will appear here and on Publications.