MINERvA is announcing the results of a precision nucleon measurement on Wednesday, Feb. 1. The colloquium will be delivered by Tejin Cai. While a student at the University of Rochester, Cai’s thesis work with advisor Kevin McFarland laid the foundations for the publication in Nature from the MINERvA collaboration.
Deborah Harris, MINERvA co-spokesperson, describes the result:
“This measurement involves antineutrinos scattering off free protons to produce neutrons. This is a new technique that hasn’t been done before: in the past this measurement was done with neutrinos scattering on the neutrons in deuterium with only handfuls of events. We collected almost a hundred thousand interactions on hydrocarbon (CH) and then subtracted off the carbon background. We could do this by using the direction of the outgoing neutron, since we measure that direction well enough to see the difference between scattering off H and scattering off C.”
Cai will deliver the colloquium remotely to the live audience in WH1W. Andrew Olivier, a postdoc at Notre Dame, will introduce the speaker and moderate the discussion. As a MINERvA graduate student, Olivier worked on MINERvA’s neutron reconstruction and improved MINERvA’s simulation of neutron interactions by using external data.
Please join us in WH1W for this colloquium, which will be followed by a wine-and-cheese reception in the Wilson Hall atrium.