Abstract:

The Booster Neutrino Experiment at Fermilab was designed to search for the transmutation of muon neutrinos into electron neutrinos consistent with an oscillation hypothesis governed by a squared mass splitting of order 1 eV2. This search was motivated by the oscillation signal reported by the LSND experiment at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1990s. First results from MiniBooNE, published earlier this year, showed no evidence of direct \nu_{\mu} to \nu_{e} oscillations. However , an as-yet-unidentified excess of electromagnetic events at low energy were observed, and possible sources will be considered in this talk. MiniBooNE represents an important demonstration of the nue appearance measurement technique for oscillation probabilities of order 1%. A new generation of νe appearance experiments are currently being planned and built in both the U.S. and Japan with beams and detectors similar to MiniBooNE. I will consider some of the analysis methods and important lessons of the MiniBooNE search.