Detecting Neutrons in MicroBooNE

Furmanski, Andrew Peter; Irwin, Burke

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DOE OSTI · 2406077

Detecting Neutrons in MicroBooNE

Furmanski, Andrew Peter·Irwin, Burke

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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.

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Furmanski, Andrew Peter, Irwin, Burke. 2024-07-15. Detecting Neutrons in MicroBooNE. https://www.osti.gov/biblio/2406077

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