Seminar Details

The Discovery of Non-Zero θ13 at Daya Bay

Wei Wang, College of William and Mary
Wednesday, September 5, 4:00 PM - Nuclear Science Seminar
NSCL Lecture Hall

The Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment is designed to be the most sensitive one to measure sin22θ13 among the current generation of short-baseline reactor neutrino experiments. Located in Southern China, its eight functionally identical detectors are hosted in the three underground experimental halls on the campus of the Daya Bay nuclear power plant where six 2.9GWth pressure water reactors provide copious electron antineutrinos. With eight weeks of data taken by the first six detectors which were commissioned by Christmas 2011, Daya Bay announced a 5-sigma discovery of non-zero θ13 on Mar 8, 2012. Additional data taken to mid-May 2012 has increased the signal significance to greater than 7-sigma, sin22θ13=0.089±0.010(stat)±0.005(syst). Daya Bay is currently completing its last two of the eight detectors and will commission the complete experiment in Fall 2012. Such an unexpected large sin22θ13 has encouraged studies of the potential to resolve mass hierarchy in a few under-construction and proposed experiments including Daya Bay II. In this talk, I will concentrate on the Daya Bay experiment design, installation, commissioning and data analysis. In addition, together with updates on the current status of Daya Bay, I will also give a brief introduction to some potential future developments relevant to the Daya Bay experiment.