Thursday, March 26, 2026
4:00 pm-5:00 pm
The elusive world of neutrino interactions
Currently running and forthcoming precision neutrino oscillation experiments aim to unambiguously determine the neutrino mass ordering, the charge-parity violating phase in the lepton sector and the possible existence of physics Beyond the Standard Model. To have an understanding of all the effects necessary for the success of these experiments, lepton-nucleus interactions must be modeled in unprecedented detail. With this effort, expertise in both neutrino and electron cross-section modeling and analysis was leveraged in order to make fundamental and critical improvements to our understanding of these interactions. The presented work takes a significant step towards this high-precision measurement era with three complementary approaches. Cross sections are reported using neutrino data sets from the MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber detector at Fermi National Laboratory, as well as electron scattering data from the CLAS detector at Thomas Jefferson National Laboratory. Furthermore, the modeling development of a commonly used event generator is presented.
Short bio: Afroditi (Papadopoulou) got her undergrad degree at the University of Athens in 2016 while carrying out an analysis using 7 TeV CMS data. She then moved to MIT for her graduate school studies, where she worked in collaboration with Prof. Or Hen. Her PhD included analyzing both neutrino data collected by the MicroBooNE detector at Fermilab in Illinois and electron scattering data at Jefferson Lab in Virginia. After her graduation in 2022, she joined Argonne National Lab as a Mayer Fellow where she is continuing her research as a member of the MicroBooNE, SBND, DUNE, and Electrons-For-Neutrinos collaborations, as well as testing performance of simulation predictions against existing and new neutrino and electron data sets. She is currently a Robert Oppenheimer fellow at LANL working on improving our understanding of neutrino interactions and will start as an assistant professor at Georgia Tech in August 2026.
