High Energy-Astrophysics| New Revelations on Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions in the GeV Domain: MiniBooNE & Beyond

Speaker: Sam Zeller

The MiniBooNE experiment at Fermilab has amassed the world's largest sample of neutrino and antineutrino events in the 1 GeV energy range; a sample that includes both quasi-elastic scattering and single pion production processes. Although the primary motivation for MiniBooNE has been the now-reported search for muon neutrino to electron neutrino oscillations, there has been recent regained interest in neutrino interaction physics. Such low energy neutrino cross section measurements have not been updated for decades, having been first measured in bubble and spark chamber experiments. New measurements are sorely needed and yield important constraints for neutrino oscillation experiments operating in this 1 GeV energy range. With an of magnitude larger statistics than historically available, study of the MiniBooNE events is already providing new and unexpected insight into low energy neutrino scattering on nuclei. In addition to discussing these new MiniBooNE results, projections for future measurements will also be presented.