Observation of tau neutrino appearance in the CNGS beam with the OPERA experiment


Agafonova N., Aleksandrov A., Anokhina A., Aoki S., Ariga A., Ariga T., ...Daha Fazla

PROGRESS OF THEORETICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL PHYSICS, sa.10, 2014 (SCI-Expanded) identifier identifier

Özet

The OPERA experiment is searching for nu(mu) -> nu(tau) oscillations in appearance mode, i.e., via the direct detection of tau leptons in nu(tau) charged-current interactions. The evidence of nu(mu) -> nu(tau) appearance has been previously reported with three nu(tau) candidate events using a sub-sample of data from the 2008-2012 runs. We report here a fourth nu(tau) candidate event, with the tau decaying into a hadron, found after adding the 2012 run events without any muon in the final state to the data sample. Given the number of analyzed events and the low background, nu(mu) -> nu(tau) oscillations are established with a significance of 4.2 sigma.