Professor Emeritus of Physics
About
Professor Roe works on the mini-BooNE experiment at Fermilab. This experiment searches for oscillations of muon neutrinos into electron neutrinos. A tentative signal for an anomalous oscillation was seen in a Los Alamos experiment. A positive result from mini-BooNE would imply a major extension of the Standard Model beyond the three presently known left-handed neutrinos and their Standard Model interactions. The current situation is that MiniBooNE sees no oscillation effect for neutrinos. The earlier Los Alamos experiment used anti-neutrinos. With anti-neutrinos, MiniBooNE seems to see an oscillation signal and is running to increase statistics for the anti-neutrino data. If true, this violates CP conservation and probably means there are more than the usual three neutrinos. In addition, for neutrinos, an anomalous number of low energy apparent neutrino events were seen. The cause for this is unknown. These results have raised considerable excitement in the physics community. One of the results was rated by the APS as one of the ten most important physics results of the year and several more have been Fermilab's “results of the week”. A large number of neutrino cross sections also have been measured which have generated considerable comment.
In addition to MiniBooNE, Professor Roe has initiated a project together with Professor Steve Rand (Physics and Applied Physics) and David Wehe (Nuclear Engineering), which investigates the possibility of a new type of particle detector. If this effort is successful, it is expected to have a major impact in several scientific fields.
Selected Publications
Measurement of Neutrino-Induced Charged-Current Charged Pion Production Cross Sections on Mineral Oil at E~1 GeV, arXiv:1011.3572 [hep-ex], (A.A. Aguilar-Arevalo et al.), Phys. Rev.D 83, 052007 (2011).
Measurement of vµ Induced Charged Current Neutral Pion Production Cross-Sections on Mineral Oil at E E~0.5-2.0 GeV, arXiv:1010.3264 [hep-ex], (A.A. Aguilar-Arevalo et al.), Phys. Rev. D 83, 052009 (2011).
Event Excess in the MiniBooNE Search for Muon Antineutrino to Electron Antineutrino Oscillations, arXiv:1007.1150 [hep-ex], (A.A. Aguilar-Arevalo et al.), Phys. Rev. Lett.105 181801 (2010), APS Result of the Week.
Unexplained Excess of Electron-Like Events From a 1 GeV Neutrino Beam, arXiv:0812.2243 [hep-ex], (A.A. Aguilar-Arevalo et al.), Phys. Rev. Lett.102, 101802 (2009).
First Measurement of the Muon Neutrino Charged Current Quasielastic Double Differential Cross Section, arXiv:1002:2680 [hep-ex], (A.A. Aguilar-Arevalo et al.), Phys. Rev. D 81, 092005 (2010), APS Result of the Week.
Measurement of Muon Neutrino Quasi-Elastic Scattering on Carbon, arXiv:0706.0926 [hep-ex], (A.A. Aguilar-Arevalo et al.), Phys. Rev. Lett.100, 032301 (2008).
A Search for Electron Neutrino Appearance at the ?m2 ~ 1 eV2 Scale”, arXiv:0704.1500 [hep-ex], (A.A. Aguilar-Arevalo et al.), Phys. Rev. Lett.98, 231801 (2007).
Particle Physics at the New Millennium, Springer Verlag, New York, NY (1996).
Statistical Errors in Monte Carlo Estimates of Systematic Error, (B. Roe),Nucl. Instrum. Meth. A 570 (2007).
Boosted Decision Trees, an Alternative to Artificial Neural Networks, arXiv:physics/0408124, (B. Roe et al.),Nucl. Instrum. Meth. A 543, 577 (2005).
Improved Probability Methods for Estimating Signal in the Presence of Background, (B.P.Roe and M.B. Woodroofe), Phys. Rev. D 60, 053009 (1999).
Probability and Statistics in Experimental Physics, Springer-Verlag, New York, NY (1992). Second edition (2001).
Particle Physics in the New Millenium, Springer Verlag, New York, NY (1996).
Field(s) of Study
- Elementary Particle Experiment
