Journal Article

Demonstration of neutron identification in neutrino interactions in the MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber

James, C., Lin, K., Luo, X., Wongjirad, T., Yandel, E., Dennis, S. R., Torbunov, D., Li, Y., Bishai, M., Ji, X., Navrer-Agasson, A., Shaevitz, M. H., Sharankova, R., Wang, J., Irwin, B., Li, J.-Y., Mariani, C., Nebot-Guinot, M., Furmanski, A. P., Horton-Smith, G. A., Safa, I., Kobilarcik, T., Cross, R., Patel, N., Detje, P., Baller, B., Pletcher, K., Fleming, B. T., Wresilo, K., Green, P., Paolone, V., Cerati, G., Bhanderi, A., Tsai, Y.-T., Gramellini, E., Eberly, B., Fine, R., Radeka, V., Basque, V., Ereditato, A., Moore, C. D., Dorrill, R., Pophale, I., Brunetti, M. B., Meddage, V., Trettin, A., Nguyen, C., Barnard, A., Martynenko, S., Foreman, W., Gu, L., Cooper-Troendle, L., Franco, D., Caratelli, D., Guzowski, P., Karagiorgi, G., Lane, N., Rondon, J. Rodriguez, Schmitz, D. W., McConkey, N., Söldner-Rembold, S., Crespo-Anadón, J. I., Tyler, J., Mendez, J., Dytman, S., Gollapinni, S., Soderberg, M., Bolton, T., Kamp, N., Mooney, M., Cao, Y., Mulleriababu, S., Uchida, M. A., Ashkenazi, A., Kirby, M., Wei, H., Arellano, L., Camilleri, L., Englezos, P., Strauss, T., Mastbaum, A., Oza, N., Yu, H. W., Jwa, Y.-J., Szelc, A. M., Taniuchi, N., Spitz, J., Diurba

2024

Overview

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.

• Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg,Springer,Springer Nature B.V,SpringerOpen
• Subject: Argon / Astronomy / Astrophysics and Cosmology / Chambers / Charged particles / Detectors / Elementary Particles / Experiments / Hadrons / Heavy Ions / Kinematics / Laboratories / Measurement Science and Instrumentation / Neutrinos / Neutrons / Nuclear Energy / Nuclear Physics / Physics / Physics and Astronomy / Protons / Quantum Field Theories / Quantum Field Theory / Radiation counters / Regular Article - Experimental Physics / Sensors / String Theory / Time measurement