3:30–4:45 pm MCP 201
Neutrino oscillations, whereby one flavour of neutrino changes to another as it travels, has been a exciting area of study over the last several decades. This process has mostly been interpreted within a framework that has three neutrinos, each paired with one of the charged leptons, but a number of anomalous results have been reported since the early 2000s which don't appear to fit within this model. One potential explanation for these anomalies is an additional "sterile" neutrino, which would not interact via the weak force, but could impact neutrino oscillations. A number of experiments have searched for such a particle, but so far, no consistent picture has emerged. The NOvA experiment is a long-baseline neutrino experiment comprised of a Near Detector 1 km from the beam source on-site at Fermilab, Batavia, IL and a Far Detector located 810 km away in Ash River, MN. In this colloquium, I will give a brief overview of the status of sterile neutrino searches in the field, and present NOvA’s most recent 3+1 sterile neutrino search.