The OPERA neutrino experiment at the underground Gran Sasso Laboratory has measured the velocity of neutrinos from the CERN CNGS beam over a baseline of about 730 km. The measurement is based on data taken by OPERA in the years 2009, 2010 and 2011. Dedicated upgrades of the CNGS timing system and of the OPERA detector, as well as a high precision geodesy campaign for the measurement of the neutrino baseline, allowed reaching comparable systematic and statistical accuracies.An arrival time of CNGS muon neutrinos with respect to the one computed assuming the speed of light in vacuum of (6.5 ± 7.4 (stat.) +8.3 −8.0 (sys.)) ns was measured corresponding to a relative difference of the muon neutrino velocity with respect to the speed of light (v − c)/c = (2.7 ± 3.1 (stat.) +3.4 −3.3 (sys.)) × 10 −6 . The above result, obtained by comparing the time distributions of neutrino interactions and of protons hitting the CNGS target in 10.5 µs long extractions, was confirmed by a test performed at the end of 2011 using a short bunch beam allowing to measure the neutrino time of flight at the single interaction level.
review the design and construction of the detector and of its related infrastructures, and report on some technical performances of the various components. The construction of the detector started in 2003 and it was completed in Summer 2008. The experiment is presently in the data taking phase. The whole sequence of operations has proven to be successful, from triggering to brick selection, development, scanning and event analysis.
Very intense neutrino beams and large neutrino detectors will be needed in order to enable the discovery of CP violation in the leptonic sector. We propose to use the proton linac of the European Spallation Source currently under construction in Lund, Sweden to deliver, in parallel with the spallation neutron production, a very intense, cost effective and high performance neutrino beam. The baseline program for the European Spallation Source linac is that it will be fully operational at 5 MW average power by 2022, producing 2 GeV 2.86 ms long proton pulses at a rate of 14 Hz. Our proposal is to upgrade the linac to 10 MW average power and 28 Hz, producing 14 pulses/s for neutron production and 14 pulses/s for neutrino production. Furthermore, because of the high current required in the pulsed neutrino horn, the length of the pulses used for neutrino production needs to be compressed to a few µs with the aid of an accumulator ring. A long baseline experiment using this Super Beam and a megaton underground Water Cherenkov detector located in existing mines 300-600 km from Lund will make it possible to discover leptonic CP violation at 5 σ significance level in up to 50% of the leptonic Dirac CP-violating phase range. This experiment could also determine the neutrino mass hierarchy at a significance level of more than 3 σ if this issue will not already have been settled by other experiments by then. The mass hierarchy performance could be increased by combining the neutrino beam results with those obtained from atmospheric neutrinos detected by the same large volume detector. This detector will also be used to measure the proton lifetime, detect cosmological neutrinos and neutrinos from supernova explosions. Results on the sensitivity to leptonic CP violation and the neutrino mass hierarchy are presented.
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