News & Events

Monday, 4 June 2018

The Neutrino 2018 conference, the world's largest conference in the field, has successfully started today in Heidelberg with more than 850 participants from universities and research centres from all over the world. Four hundred posters will also be presented, and tomorrow the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics, Arthur McDonald, will be giving a public lecture.

An enlightening opening talk has been given by Eligio Lisi, followed by the updated results from the man-made neutrino beam experiments NOvA, T2K and MINOS.

T2K provides a normal to inverted neutrino mass ordering Bayes factor of 7.9, and the CP phase delta conserving values outside the 2 sigma region.

The NOvA experiment team have released their results involving the antineutrino data with more than 4σ evidence of electron antineutrino appearance. Combined to the neutrino data, the results prefer the normal hierarchy and the higher octant with a significance of almost 2σ. In particular, for the normal ordering, their best fit point sets sin²θ₂₃ = 0.58 ± 0.03 and ∆m²₃₂ = 2.51^+0.12_-0.08 ×10^-3eV²

The MINOS and MINOS+ collaborations have also shown new results after adding the data collected by MINOS+ during the period 2014-2017. They have improved previous MINOS’s measurements on the 3 neutrino standard oscillations, especially in the determination of ∆m²₃₂ = 2.42×10^-3eV² with a relative uncertainty of 3.5%.

MINOS and MINOS+ set the strongest limits on sterile neutrino oscillations in most of the region with sterile neutrino masses below 10 eV squared. All the details can be found in their paper.

Finally, the status and prospects of future long-based neutrino experiments, such as Hyper-Kamiokande or DUNE, have been discussed.

Follow the conference and these very interesting results at the conference website.

Text by Olga Mena, Xabier Marcano, Josu Hernández-García & Álvaro Hernández-Cabezudo.