"MI" stands for the Main Injector, a Fermilab accelerator that provides high-energy protons which are targeted to create the neutrino beam.

MINERvA studies neutrino interactions with several materials, in particular helium, carbon, iron or lead, each having a different value of A.

[14] MINERvA's techniques provide a proof of principle for applications expected to result in higher precision in future experiments.

MINERvA's first scientific results measured the rate of these processes in correlation with the visible energy from knocked-out protons.

[33][34][35][36][37][38][39] One of the main conclusions of that work is that the production of pions from nuclei appears to be suppressed in low-momentum transfer reactions.

[40] MINERvA has also precisely measured a rare process, coherent pion production, which involves scattering off the entire nucleus, leaving it intact.

[41][42][43][44] MINERvA has studied production of charged kaons,[45][46][47] a process that is an important background to searches for proton decay.

[49][50] Work in pre-publication form as of 2022 has expanded these comparisons to include quasielastic scattering [51] and charged pion production.

[52] This recent data provides evidence that the low-momentum transfer suppression of the reaction occurs in many nuclei.

[54] In making these measurements, a surprising number of events with neutral pions and little else visible in the detector were found.

Over a period of 6 minutes, this sequence was delivered by either the presence (1) or absence (0) of a neutrino pulse, over a distance of about a kilometer.