They were on target...

I worked as a summer intern at Fermilab a few years ago. It was my job to do some dose rate estimations for NUMI project, which was the sister project to MINOS. NUMI (Neutrinos for the Main Injector), was tasked with delivering the neutrino beam which would be used by MINOS.

To answer your concerns about beam divergence, and initial trajectories here is a quick overview, from the abstract of my FINAL PAPER , of how the Neutrino beam is created. The jist of it is that the beam was not steered and focused as a beam of Neutrinos. Initially the beam, consists of very short lived particals called Pions and Kaons. The Pions and Kaons resulted from a proton beam coliding with a carbon target. The Pions and Kaons were directed and focused by 2 electro-magnetic focusing horns. The Pions and Kaons, then rapidly decay into Muons and Muon Neutrinos. The net result is a very tight beam of Muon Nutrinos.

In an effort to verify the Japanese Super-K (Super-Kamiokande) experiment's conclusion that neutrinos have mass Fermilab's MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) experiment will attempt to find oscillations in neutrino flavors (muon, electron, & tau). Such oscillations would be definitive proof that neutrinos have mass. NuMI (Neutrinos at the Main Injector) is the Fermilab project that is responsible for providing the beam of muon neutrinos to be used by the MINOS experiment.

A beam of 120 GeV protons will be extracted from Fermilab's "Main Injector" where it will pass through a target hall. In the target hall the beam of protons will collide with a Carbon Target producing a scatter of charged pions and kaons. An electromagnetic horn will re-culminate this beam and a second horn will focus the energy of this beam, which will then pass through a decay pipe where the pion/kaon beam will decay into muons and muon neutrinos. The beam will then pass through an absorber and about 50 ft of rock that will remove unwanted particles still in the beam such as the muons. This leaves a beam of pure muon neutrinos to pass through the MINOS near detector, which will verify the composition of the beam. The beam then passes underground 730 km to the MINOS far detector located half a mile underground in the Soudan mine in Minnesota, which will again look at the composition of the beam.
The data at the far detector will be compared to the data at the near detector, and if electron or tau neutrinos are found in the beam at the MINOS far detector then two things will happen. First there will be a large celebration at Fermilab, and second the NuMI target hall will be reconfigured to deliver a different energy level focus by moving the second horn into a different position along the beam-line. The MINOS experiment will then go on to try to answer other important neutrino questions such as what is the difference in the square of the masses of the oscillating neutrinos ("delta mass squared").

So Aparently I was wrong about the party at Fermilab. I can't see as how a weekend full of meetings is any substitute. ;0)


Cheers, Fuzzy the Quantum Duck.

=0)