Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Article number1052
JournalEuropean Physical Journal C
Volume84
Issue number10
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 2024

Funding

FundersFunder number
National Science Foundation
High Energy Physics and Nuclear Physics
Science and Technology Facilities Council
NSF AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions
U.S. Department of Energy
United Kingdom Research and Innovation
Fermilab
Albert Einstein Center for Fundamental Physics
Office of Science
Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung
Royal Society
UK Research and Innovation
Fermi Research Alliance, LLCDE-AC02-07CH11359

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Demonstration of neutron identification in neutrino interactions in the MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this