MiniBooNE

The MiniBooNE experiment was a neutrino oscillation experiment located at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. Its primary goal was to search for neutrino oscillations by observing the ratio of muon neutrinos to electron neutrinos in a beam produced at Fermilab. The experiment ran from 2002 to 2019.

MiniBooNE used a large spherical tank filled with mineral oil, which served as both the neutrino source and the detector. Neutrinos produced at Fermilab would travel through the earth and interact with the oil. The experiment was designed to detect the products of these interactions, specifically looking for events that indicated a muon neutrino transforming into an electron neutrino, a phenomenon known as neutrino oscillation.

The experiment collected a significant amount of data and provided valuable insights into neutrino physics. While it did not definitively confirm neutrino oscillations, its results contributed to the broader understanding of the neutrino mass spectrum and mixing parameters. MiniBooNE also investigated anomalies in its data that hinted at the possibility of sterile neutrinos, a hypothetical type of neutrino that does not interact via the weak nuclear force. These hints, however, remained statistically inconclusive. The experiment concluded its data collection in 2019, and analysis of its full dataset continues to be a subject of study for the physics community.