Mass, Models, & Methods: The challenges of doing long baseline neutrino physics

• Lukas Koch (JGU Mainz)

Room: Lecture Theatre Long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments probe some of the most fundamental open questions in particle physics by observing flavour changes in neutrino beams over hundreds of kilometres. Three challenges define the field. Mass: neutrino interaction cross sections are famously tiny, demanding kilotonne-scale detectors and multi-year exposures. Models: no event generator simultaneously describes all measured cross sections, and their disagreements feed directly into oscillation systematics. Methods: since incoming flavour and energy are unknown event-by-event, we rely on joint near/far fits and advanced statistical methods to extract physics. In this presentation I will introduce these difficulties, and the ingenuity they demand, and demonstrate why doing long baseline neutrino physics is hard, but fun!