Andrzej Szelc, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, has been elected as co-spokesperson for the Short-Baseline Near Detector experiment. SBND plays an essential role in the Short-Baseline Neutrino Program at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
“I’ve seen SBND’s voyage from an idea to becoming a reality. It’s a great honor to be chosen as the first international spokesperson to co-lead this collaboration into this next stage of data analysis,” said Szelc.
Spokespeople for physics experiments are principal leaders of the collaborations conducting the research. They ensure experiments operate effectively to meet scientific goals and serve as the primary representatives in communications.
The SBND collaboration brings together 210 scientists from 40 institutions in Brazil, Spain, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S.
Szelc, who previously served as the experiment’s physics coordinator, will succeed Ornella Palamara — a senior Fermilab scientist recently appointed director of user facilities and experiments — who has co-led the collaboration since 2014.
“Ornella has been instrumental in building the fantastic SBND collaboration, and her scientific vision and contributions to the experiment go back to the very beginning when we just had a notion of building a near detector along the neutrino beamline,” said David Schmitz, professor at the University of Chicago and co-spokesperson for the SBND collaboration. “Andrzej’s experience with SBND and other experiments of this kind is very broad, and I look forward to working with him as we continue our first physics run.”
As the near detector in the Short-Baseline Neutrino Program, SBND observes the neutrinos as they are produced in the Fermilab beam. This enables the SBN Program to definitively know the composition of the neutrino beam before it has a chance to change, through a process called oscillation, giving the collaboration a better handle on testing for the existence of a new type of neutrino.
Since seeing their first neutrinos last year, the SBND collaboration started their first official physics run in December. “We have this detector that works fantastically well, and we can reconstruct the neutrino interactions very, very precisely,” said Szelc. “Already, we’re seeing about 7,000 neutrinos per day. That adds up to the largest sample of neutrino interactions on argon in the world.”
SBND’s large data sample will enable physicists to study neutrino interactions in unprecedented detail. The physics of these interactions is crucial for other neutrino experiments, such as the long-baseline Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.
“Our live time for capturing neutrinos has been 98.6%, which isn’t something every experiment can say for its first run,” said Schmitz. “And the quality of the data is extremely high, thanks to the international team of amazing scientists working on SBND, strong support from Fermilab for the experiment, and an incredibly stable beam delivery from the Fermilab Accelerator Complex, making this year the best yet for the Booster Neutrino Beam.”
With so many neutrino interactions, SBND is also advancing techniques for the analysis of scientific data, including machine learning methods, which can be applied at nearly every stage of the data analysis. The progress made with this kind of pattern recognition software can be used in other applications like medical physics — including analysis of images from X-rays, CT-scans and MRIs.
The Short-Baseline Near Detector international collaboration is hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The collaboration consists of 40 partner institutions, including national labs and universities from five countries. SBND is one of the particle detectors in the Short-Baseline Neutrino Program that provides information on a beam of neutrinos created by Fermilab’s particle accelerators.
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. Fermi Forward Discovery Group manages Fermilab for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov and follow us on social media.
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