The NOvA Experiment: Status and Outlook

Abstract

The NOvA long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment is currently under construction and will use an upgraded NuMI neutrino source at Fermilab and a 14-kton detector at Ash River, Minnesota to explore the neutrino sector. NOvA uses a highly active, finely segmented detector design that offers superb event identification capability, allowing precision measurements of ν_e/ν_e-bar appearance and ν_μ/ν_μ-bar disappearance, through which NOvA will provide constraints on θ_13, θ_23, |Δm^2_atm|, the neutrino mass hierarchy, and the CP-violating phase δ. In this article, we review NOvA's uniquely broad physics scope, including sensitivity updates in light of the latest knowledge of θ_13, and we discuss the experiment's construction and operation timeline.

7 pages, 13 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the XXV International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics (Neutrino 2012)