Experimental evidence has established that neutrino flavor states evolve over time. A neutrino of a particular flavor that travels some distance can be detected in a different neutrino flavor state. The Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) is a long-baseline experiment that is designed to study this phenomenon, called neutrino oscillations. MINOS is based at Fermilab near Chicago, IL, and consists of two detectors: the Near Detector located at Fermilab, and the Far Detector, which is located in an old iron mine in Soudan, MN. Both detectors are exposed to a beam of muon neutrinos from the NuMI beamline, and MINOS measures the fraction of muon neutrinos that disappear after traveling the 734 km between the two detectors. One can measure the atmospheric neutrino mass splitting and mixing angle by observing the energy-dependence of this muon neutrino disappearance. MINOS has made several prior measurements of these parameters. Here I describe recently-developed techniques used to enhance our sensitivity to the oscillation parameters, and I present the results obtained when they are applied to a dataset that is twice as large as has been previously analyzed. We measure the mass splitting {Delta}m{sub 23}{sup 2} = (2.32{sub -0.08}{sup +0.12}) x 10{sup -3} eV{sup …

Heusler intermetallics Mn{sub 2}Y Ga and X{sub 2}MnGa (X; Y =Fe, Co, Ni) undergo tetragonal magnetostructural transitions that can result in half metallicity, magnetic shape memory, or the magnetocaloric effect. Understanding the magnetism and magnetic behavior in functional materials is often the most direct route to being able to optimize current materials for todays applications and to design novel ones for tomorrow. Synchrotron soft x-ray magnetic spectromicroscopy techniques are well suited to explore the the competing effects from the magnetization and the lattice parameters in these materials as they provide detailed element-, valence-, and site-specifc information on the coupling of crystallographic ordering and electronic structure as well as external parameters like temperature and pressure on the bonding and exchange. Fundamental work preparing the model systems of spintronic, multiferroic, and energy-related compositions is presented for context. The methodology of synchrotron spectroscopy is presented and applied to not only magnetic characterization but also of developing a systematic screening method for future examples of materials exhibiting any of the above effects. The chapter progression is as follows: an introduction to the concepts and materials under consideration (Chapter 1); an overview of sample preparation techniques and results, and the kinds of characterization methods employed …

In this thesis, we report on a measurement of muon neutrino inclusive charged current interactions on carbon in the few GeV region, using the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Beam. The all neutrino mode data collected in the SciBooNE experiment is used for this analysis. We collected high-statistics CC interaction sample at SciBooNE, and extracted energy dependent inclusive charged current interaction rates and cross sections for a wide energy range from 0.25 GeV to {approx}3 GeV. We measure the interaction rates with 6-15% precision, and the cross sections with 10-30% precision. We also made an energy integrated measurements, with the precisions of 3% for the rate, and 8% for the cross section measurements. This is the first measurement of the CC inclusive cross section on carbon around 1 GeV. This inclusive interaction measurement is nearly free from effects of hadron re-interactions in the nucleus. Hence, it is complementary to other exclusive cross section measurements, and essential to understand the neutrino interaction cross sections in the few GeV region, which is relevant to ongoing and future neutrino oscillation experiments. This analysis also provides the normalization for SciBooNE's previous cross section ratio measurements for charged current coherent pion production and neutral current neutral pion …

A sample of W {yields} e{nu} (W {yields} {mu}{nu}) and Z{sup 0} {yields} e{sup +}e{sup -} (Z{sup 0} {yields} {mu}{sup +}{mu}{sup -}) events recorded by the CDF detector for p{bar p} collisions at {radical}s = 1.96 TeV are used to evaluate the systematic uncertainty in the determination of the W boson mass arising from uncertainties in the parton distribution functions and higher-order QCD effects. The systematic contribution of PDFs is determined to be 10 MeV/c{sup 2} for MSTW2008 NLO and 12 MeV/c{sup 2} for CTEQ6.6. The total systematic contribution arising from higher-order QCD effects in 9 MeV/c{sup 2}. The Z{sup 0} events are used to extract improved estimates of the phenomenological parameters in the BLNY model that describes low transverse momentum.

Charged current single pion production (CC{pi}{sup +}) and charged current quasi-elastic scattering (CCQE) are the most abundant interaction types for neutrinos at energies around 1 GeV, a region of great interest to oscillation experiments. The cross-sections for these processes, however, are not well understood in this energy range. This dissertation presents a measurement of the ratio of CC{pi}{sup +} to CCQE cross-sections for muon neutrinos on mineral oil (CH{sub 2}) in the MiniBooNE experiment. The measurement is presented here both with and without corrections for hadronic re-interactions in the target nucleus and is given as a function of neutrino energy in the range 0.4 GeV < E{sub {nu}} < 2.4 GeV. With more than 46,000 CC{pi}{sup +} events collected in MiniBooNE, and with a fractional uncertainty of roughly 11% in the region of highest statistics, this measurement represents a dramatic improvement in statistics and precision over previous CC{pi}{sup +} and CCQE measurements.