Demonstration of neutron identification in neutrino interactions in the MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber
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Volume
84
Publisher
DOI
10.1140/epjc/s10052-024-13423-z
Journal
European Physical Journal C
Issue
ISSN
1434-6044
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
A significant challenge in measurements of neutrino oscillations is reconstructing the incoming neutrino energies. While modern fully-active tracking calorimeters such as liquid argon time projection chambers in principle allow the measurement of all final state particles above some detection threshold, undetected neutrons remain a considerable source of missing energy with little to no data constraining their production rates and kinematics. We present the first demonstration of tagging neutrino-induced neutrons in liquid argon time projection chambers using secondary protons emitted from neutron-argon interactions in the MicroBooNE detector. We describe the method developed to identify neutrino-induced neutrons and demonstrate its performance using neutrons produced in muon-neutrino charged current interactions. The method is validated using a small subset of MicroBooNE’s total dataset. The selection yields a sample with 60% of selected tracks corresponding to neutron-induced secondary protons. At this purity, the integrated efficiency is 8.4% for neutrons that produce a detectable proton.
Authors
Abratenko, P; Alterkait, O; Aldana, DA; Arellano, L; Asaadi, J; Ashkenazi, A; Balasubramanian, S; Baller, B; Barnard, A; Barr, GCollections
- Physics and Astronomy [1510]