Professor Emeritus
About
Professor Roe has worked on the mini-BooNE experiment at Fermilab since the conception of the experiment in about 2000. This experiment searches for oscillations of muon neutrinos into electron neutrinos. A possible signal for an anomalous signal in anti-neutrinos had been seen in a Los Alamos experiment (LSND). A few years ago MiniBooNE confirmed the LSND results at about the 3.9 standard deviation level, finding anomalous electron-like events in neutrino and antineutrino oscillations. In 2018 with more data, the anomalous signal is confirmed at 4.7 standard deviations. If LSND data is included the signal level is almost 6 standard deviations. This was a featured publication in PRL in 2018 and was chosen by the APS as one of the ten most interesting results they published (in all fields) in 2018. A positive result implies a major extension of the Standard Model.
At an early stage of MiniBooNE (2006) I wrote a MiniBooNE technote (191) suggesting a way of using stopping kaons to obtain a measurement of interactions of monoenergetic neutrinos. At the time we didn’t have sufficient data to carry this out. More recently, Josh Spitz and Joe Grange independently rediscovered the technique and MiniBooNE has published the results in another featured result in PRL in 2018.
For a few years, we ran in a beam dump mode searching for sub-GeV dark matter particles. In 2017 we published our results in still a third featured publication in PRL. This was based on neutral current-like events and was sufficient to rule out most of the region in which these particles may have been the cause of the g-2 discrepancy. We are now in the final stages of preparing a new publication adding results from two other channels (electron-like and pi0-like) which will reduce our limits further.
In addition, MiniBooNE has measured various neutrino cross-sections in the energy range below 2 GeV with about two orders of magnitude more events than any previous study.
For the DUNE long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment I calculated the density of the earth vs the distance of the beam from Fermilab and examined the effect of the variable densities on the oscillation probabilities both for CP conserving and CP-violating decays. This work was published in a Physical Review article in 2017.
Selected Publications
Probability and Statistics in the Physical Sciences, 3rd edition, Springer-Verlag, New York, NY (October 2020).
PRL Editors Suggestion: Significant Excess of Electronlike Events in the MiniBooNE Short-Baseline Neutrino Experiment Phys. Rev. Lett. 121 221801 (2018).
PRL Editors Suggestion: First Measurement of Monoenergetic Muon Neutrino Charged Current Interactions Phys. Rev. Lett. 120 141802 (2018).
Matter Density Versus Distance for the Neutrino Beam From Fermilab to Lead, South Dakota, and Comparison of Oscillations with Variable and Constant Density, (Byron Roe), Phys. Rev. D 95, 113004 (June 21, 2017).
PRL Editors' Suggestion Dark Matter Search in a Proton Beam Dump with MiniBooNE (A. A. Aguilar-Arevalo et al.), (MiniBooNE-DM Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 221803 (May 31, 2017).
Measurement of Neutrino-Induced Charged-Current Charged Pion Production Cross Sections on Mineral Oil at E~1 GeV, arXiv:1011.3572 [hep-ex], (A.A. Aguilar-Arevalo et al.), Phys. Rev. D 83, 052007 (2011).
Measurement of vµ Induced Charged Current Neutral Pion Production Cross-Sections on Mineral Oil at E E~0.5-2.0 GeV, arXiv:1010.3264 [hep-ex], (A.A. Aguilar-Arevalo et al.), Phys. Rev. D 83, 052009 (2011).
Event Excess in the MiniBooNE Search for Muon Antineutrino to Electron Antineutrino Oscillations, arXiv:1007.1150 [hep-ex], (A.A. Aguilar-Arevalo et al.), Phys. Rev. Lett. 105 181801 (2010), APS Result of the Week.
First Measurement of the Muon Neutrino Charged Current Quasielastic Double Differential Cross Section, arXiv:1002:2680 [hep-ex], (A.A. Aguilar-Arevalo et al.), Phys. Rev. D 81, 092005 (2010), APS Result of the Week.
Boosted Decision Trees, an Alternative to Artificial Neural Networks, arXiv:physics/0408124, (B. Roe et al.), Nucl. Instrum. Meth. A 543, 577 (2005).
Improved Probability Methods for Estimating Signal in the Presence of Background, (B.P.Roe and M.B. Woodroofe), Phys. Rev. D 60, 053009 (1999).
Particle Physics in the New Millenium, Springer Verlag, New York, NY (1996).
Field(s) of Study
- Elementary Particle Experiment
