The MINERvA Experiment: getting a closer look at neutrinos

The discovery that neutrinos oscillate and therefore have mass has led to a broad new program of long baseline neutrino experiments. However, there is still much that we don't know about the way neutrinos themselves interact in nuclei, and this could ultimately limit how well we can measure oscillation probabilities. The MINERvA experiment will use a fine-grained hermetic detector to measure precisely the many ways that few GeV neutrinos interact in different nuclei, using the NuMI beamline at Fermilab. This talk will discuss the physics justification for the MINERvA experiment, give a brief overview of the detector and the status of its construction and commissioning.