Dr Christopher Backhouse - Results and Prospects from the NOvA Experiment

The phenomenon of neutrino oscillations, which implies that neutrinos are not massless as we had previously believed, raises a wealth of new and intriguing questions. What is the ordering of the neutrino mass states? Might neutrino oscillations violate matter/antimatter symmetry? What structure, if any, does the neutrino mixing matrix have? The NOvA experiment directly addresses these questions by measuring the changes undergone by a powerful neutrino beam over an 810 km baseline, from its source at Fermilab, Illinois to a huge 14 kton detector in Ash River, Minnesota. I will give a brief overview of neutrino oscillations, then present updated NOvA measurements of the disappearance of muon neutrinos and their transformation into electron neutrinos, the implications of these results, and prospects for the future.