Speaker: Bryce Littlejohn, UW Department of Physics Graduate Student
Abstract: Many experiments in the last few decades have demonstrated the neutrino's ability to change flavor while traveling through space and time, or oscillate. One of the last remaining unknown parameters describing this oscillation, theta13, is crucial in defining the magnitude of CP-violation in the lepton sector and examining the neutrino's role in the universe's matter-antimatter asymmetry. The Daya Bay experiment has measured theta13 with unprecedented precision by observing disappearance of reactor antineutrinos with identical detectors at multiple reactor distances. With roughly two months of data, the experiment has measured the value of sin^2(2theta13) to be 0.092 +- 0.017, and excluded the theta13=0 hypothesis to five standard deviations. This talk will describe the Daya Bay experiment, present an independent analysis of first Daya Bay data, and discuss the implications of this exciting measurement.