Using a beam made (mainly) by muon neutrinos traveling through the earth, the NOvA Experiment looks for the appearance of electron neutrinos, a transformation explained by the quantum-mechanics phenomenon known as neutrino oscillation.
NOvA uses two neutrino detectors located 14.6 mrad off-axis from the main beam directions. The first detector (Near Detector, ND) stands at a distance of 1 km from the neutrino source, while the second one (Far Detector, FD), is at 810 km. Traveling from the ND to the FD, muon neutrinos can morph into electron neutrinos with a probability depending upon the parameters dm^2_32 and sin^2th_23, among others. By comparing the observed number of muon-neutrinos and electron-neutrinos events at the FD with the expected number of events predicted by a 3-neutrino oscillation model, NOvA is able to measure these parameters and improve our understanding about neutrinos.
After a brief introduction to the physics of neutrinos and a presentation of the experiment, in this talk recent results obtained by NOvA through the study of muon neutrino oscillations numu->numu and numu->nue, are presented.
