Abstract: Electron antineutrino appearance is measured by the T2K experiment in an accelerator-produced antineutrino beam, using additional neutrino beam operation to constrain parameters of the Pontecorvo-Maki-Nakagawa-Sakata (PMNS) mixing matrix. T2K observes 15 candidate electron antineutrino events with a background expectation of 9.3 events. Including information from the kinematic distribution of observed events, the hypothesis of no electron antineutrino appearance is disfavored with a significance of 2.40s and no discrepancy between data and PMNS predictions is found. A complementary analysis that introduces an additional free parameter which allows non-PMNS values of electron neutrino and antineutrino appearance also finds no discrepancy between data and PMNS predictions.

Abstract: The charge-conjugation and parity-reversal (CP) symmetry of fundamental particles is a symmetry between matter and antimatter. Violation of this CP symmetry was first observed in 1964(1), and CP violation in the weak interactions of quarks was soon established(2). Sakharov proposed(3) that CP violation is necessary to explain the observed imbalance of matter and antimatter abundance in the Universe. However, CP violation in quarks is too small to support this explanation. So far, CP violation has not been observed in non-quark elementary particle systems. It has been shown that CP violation in leptons could generate the matter-antimatter disparity through a process called leptogenesis(4). Leptonic mixing, which appears in the standard model's charged current interactions(5,6), provides a potential source of CP violation through a complex phase dCP, which is required by some theoretical models of leptogenesis(7-9). This CP violation can be measured in muon neutrino to electron neutrino oscillations and the corresponding antineutrino oscillations, which are experimentally accessible using accelerator-produced beams as established by the Tokai-to-Kamioka (T2K) and NOvA experiments(10,11). Until now, the value of dCP has not been substantially constrained by neutrino oscillation experiments. Here we report a measurement using long-baseline neutrino and antineutrino oscillations observed by the T2K experiment that shows a large increase in the neutrino oscillation probability, excluding values of dCP that result in a large increase in the observed antineutrino oscillation probability at three standard deviations (3 sigma). The 3 sigma confidence interval for delta(CP), which is cyclic and repeats every 2p, is [-3.41, -0.03] for the so-called normal mass ordering and [-2.54, -0.32] for the inverted mass ordering. Our results indicate CP violation in leptons and our method enables sensitive searches for matter-antimatter asymmetry in neutrino oscillations using accelerator-produced neutrino beams. Future measurements with larger datasets will test whether leptonic CP violation is larger than the CP violation in quarks.

Abstract: Xe-CO2 mixtures are important alternatives to pure xenon in Time Projection Chambers (TPC) based on secondary scintillation (electroluminescence) signal amplification with applications in the important field of rare event detection such as directional dark matter, double electron capture and double beta decay detection. The addition of CO2 to pure xenon at the level of 0.05-0.1% can reduce significantly the scale of electron diffusion from 10 mm/root m to 2.5 mm/root m, with high impact on the discrimination of the events through pattern recognition of the topology of primary ionization trails. We have measured the electroluminescence (EL) yield of Xe-CO2 mixtures, with sub-percent CO2 concentrations. We demonstrate that the EL production is still high in these mixtures, 70% and 35% relative to that produced in pure xenon, for CO2 concentrations around 0.05% and 0.1%, respectively. The contribution of the statistical fluctuations in EL production to the energy resolution increases with increasing CO2 concentration, being smaller than the contribution of the Fano factor for concentrations below 0.1% CO2.