Measurement of the flux-averaged inclusive charged-current electron neutrino and antineutrino cross section on argon using the NuMI beam and the MicroBooNE detector
Name
PhysRevD.104.052002.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.59 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
aa63cec29ab9ba9a1c0b055858bfad29
Author(s)
Conrad, Janet
Hen, Or
Date Issued
2021
Journal
Physical Review D
Publisher
American Physical Society (APS)
Citation
Conrad, Janet and Hen, Or. 2021. "Measurement of the flux-averaged inclusive charged-current electron neutrino and antineutrino cross section on argon using the NuMI beam and the MicroBooNE detector." Physical Review D, 104 (5).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We present a measurement of the combined $\nu_e$ + $\bar{\nu}_e$
flux-averaged charged-current inclusive cross section on argon using data from
the MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) at Fermilab. Using
the off-axis flux from the NuMI beam, MicroBooNE has reconstructed 214
candidate $\nu_e$ + $\bar{\nu}_e$ interactions with an estimated exposure of
2.4$\times10^{20}$ protons on target. Given the estimated purity of 38.6\%,
this implies the observation of 80 $\nu_e$ + $\bar{\nu}_e$ events in argon, the
largest such sample to date. The analysis includes the first demonstration of a
fully automated application of a dE/dx-based particle discrimination technique
of electron and photon induced showers in a LArTPC neutrino detector. We
measure the $\nu_e + \bar{\nu}_e$ flux-averaged charged-current total cross
section to be
${6.84\pm\!1.51~\textrm{(stat.)}\pm\!2.33~\textrm{(sys.)}\!\times\!10^{-39}~\textrm{cm}^{2}/~\textrm{nucleon}}$,
for neutrino energies above 250 MeV and an average neutrino flux energy of 905
MeV when this threshold is applied. The measurement is sensitive to neutrino
events where the final state electron momentum is above 48 MeV/c, includes the
entire angular phase space of the electron, and is in agreement with the
theoretical predictions from \texttt{GENIE} and \texttt{NuWro}. This
measurement is also the first demonstration of electron neutrino reconstruction
in a surface LArTPC in the presence of cosmic ray backgrounds, which will be a
crucial task for surface experiments like those that comprise the
Short-Baseline Neutrino (SBN) Program at Fermilab.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PHYSREVD.104.052002
