There are rumors in the particle physics community: MiniBooNE is releasing its results this week. A lot of people are muttering about it, with both hope and concern. MiniBooNE, the “miniature” version of the Booster Neutrino Experiment (BOONE), is a neutrino experiment based at Fermilab. It takes the low-energy protons off the proton booster and smashes them into a target, producing pions, focusing them, and using the muon neutrinos that result from pion decay as the main experimental tool. In their own words,
BooNE will investigate the question of neutrino mass by searching for oscillations of muon neutrinos into electron neutrinos. This will be done by directing a muon neutrino beam into the MiniBooNE detector and looking for electron neutrinos. This experiment is motivated by the oscillation results reported by the LSND experiment at Los Alamos.
LSND made a very controversial discovery. They claimed that their data was consistent with what is called a “sterile neutrino”. Unlike the neutrino flavors of the Standard Model – electron, muon, and tau – a sterile neutrino cannot interact with normal matter. It can only communicate with other neutrinos. Because of neutrino oscillations, the changing of one neutrino flavor into another, neutrinos from the normal matter world can convert into a sterile neutrino, lost forever from our ability to detect them unless they oscillate back.
No other experiment could confirm or refute the LSND claim. Much effort was spent trying to find any mistakes in LSND’s approach, but nothing was ever conclusive. BooNE was proposed to test the LSND observation. MiniBooNE was the experiment that got funded and started taking data, a smaller (and somewhat less compelling) version of the proposed BooNE experiment. Now, years after they closed their dataset, there is a rumor that the release of their results is imminent. A seminar is apparently scheduled at Fermilab this week,
by my former colleague from the canceled Braidwood Neutrino Experiment and MiniBOONE Spokeswoman, Janet Conrad. The week afterward, my old colleague Hiro Tanaka is scheduled to speak at SLAC about a topic “To Be Announced”. He’s on MiniBooNE and spoke about the status of the experiment last year at ICHEP in Moscow.
SLAC Experimental Seminar, April 17
I’ll be in Jacksonville when Hiro is at SLAC, unfortunately, although I’d be surprised if there isn’t a talk at APS about the results. I wonder what they will say? Did MiniBooNE collect enough data to be definitive? Did they get control over the systematics, like those Hiro talked about at ICHEP? Have they confirmed, or refuted, LSND? In just a few days, the landscape of physics may have changed, or we may be asking for the government to please just fund BOONE and stop goofing around with smaller experiments.
