Measurement of Neutral Current Elastic Cross Section in MicroBooNE
The MicroBooNE experiment is an 85 ton active volume liquid-argon time projection chamber located in the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Beamline. MicroBooNE’s ability to detect low-energy protons allows us to study single proton events with a four-momentum transfer squared, Q$^2$, as low as 0.10 GeV$^2$. We present a measurement of the flux-averaged neutral-current elastic differential cross sections for neutrinos scattering on argon as a function of Q$^2$, proton momentum and proton angle with respect to the direction of the neutrino beam. This is our first step towards extracting the strange quark contribution to the axial form factor, which is not only the least-constrained contribution to the neutral-current elastic scattering cross section but is also crucial for understanding the strange quark contribution to the proton spin.