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A detailed understanding of inclusive muon neutrino charged-current interactions on argon is crucial to the study of neutrino oscillations in current and future experiments using liquid argon time projection chambers. To that end, we report a comprehensive set of differential cross section measurements for this channel that simultaneously probe the leptonic and hadronic systems by dividing the channel into final states with and without protons. Measurements of the proton kinematics and proton multiplicity of the final state are also presented. For these measurements, we utilize data collected with the MicroBooNE detector from protons on target from the Fermilab booster neutrino beam at a mean neutrino energy of approximately 0.8 GeV. We present in detail the cross section extraction procedure, including the unfolding, and model validation that uses data to model comparisons and the conditional constraint formalism to detect mismodeling that may introduce biases to extracted cross sections that are larger than their uncertainties. The validation exposes insufficiencies in the overall model, motivating the inclusion of an additional data-driven reweighting systematic to ensure the accuracy of the unfolding. The extracted results are compared to a number of event generators and their performance is discussed with a focus on the regions of phase space that indicate the greatest need for modeling improvements. Published by the American Physical Society2024
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A Modified Slicing Method with Multi-Dimensional Unfolding to Measure Hadron-Argon Cross Sections
Liquid argon technology is widely used by many previous and current neutrino experiments, and it is also promising for future large-scale neutrino experiments. When detecting neutrinos using liquid argon, many hadrons are involved, which can also interact with argon nuclei. In order to gain a better understanding of the detection processes, and to simulate neutrino events, knowledge of hadron-argon cross sections is needed. This paper describes a new procedure which improves upon the previous work with multi-dimensional unfolding to measure hadron-argon cross sections in a liquid argon time projection chamber. Through a simplified version of simulation, we demonstrate the validity of this procedure.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2209601
- PAR ID:
- 10556762
- Publisher / Repository:
- MDPI
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Instruments
- Volume:
- 8
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2410-390X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 15
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/instruments8010015
