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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

Status of the Muon Neutrino Charged-Current Zero Mesons Cross Section at the NOvA Near Detector

NOvA is a long-baseline accelerator neutrino experiment at Fermilab whose physics goals include precision neutrino oscillation as well as cross-section measurements. We present the status of the measurement of a muon neutrino charged-current cross section with zero mesons in the final state at the NOvA near detector. This measurement is being made with respect to the kinematics of the final state muon. The chosen interaction channel is especially sensitive to quasielastic and meson exchange current interactions and aims to provide experimental constraints for the development of models of neutrino interactions. It will also provide a handle for constraining cross section systematic uncertainties in oscillation analyses in current and future experiments. For particle identification, we use a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on individual particles simulated in the NOvA near detector that allows us to select the desired signal while reducing the potential bias from neutrino interaction modeling. Charged pion background constraining is further improved via Michel electron tagging.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2026

Measurement of the muon neutrino charged-current mesonless cross section in the NOvA near detector

NOvA is a long-baseline accelerator neutrino experiment at Fermilab. Its physics goals include precision neutrino oscillation measurements, neutrino interaction cross-section measurements and beyond Standard Model explorations. We present a measurement of muon neutrino charged-current cross section with zero mesons in the final state at the NOvA near detector. This measurement is performed as a function of the kinematics of the final state muon. Our chosen interaction channel is especially sensitive to quasielastic and meson exchange current interactions and it provides handles for constraining the cross section systematic uncertainties in oscillation analyses in present and future experiments. For particle identification, we use a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on individual particles simulated in the NOvA Near detector. This allows us to select the desired signal while reducing the potential bias from neutrino interaction modeling. We study strategies for constraining the remaining charged-pion background via Michel electron information in a template fitting approach. The main experimental result is a two-dimensional differential cross section as a function of final-state muon kinetic energy and polar angle. The parameters of this measurement, including binning and unfolding, were optimized to reduce the expected systematic uncertainty in the total cross section. The final result shows good agreement with the main GENIE-based simulation framework that was independently fine-tuned in NOvA. We finally propose improvements and subsequent steps that build on this analysis and further dissect the final states of neutrino interactions. This work has been supported by US DOE grant DE-SC0015684.

Sánchez Falero, Sebastián Jesús [Iowa State U.]↗
DOE OSTI2018

The Mu2e Tracker

The Mu2e experiment will search for neutrinoless conversion of muons into electrons In the field of an aluminum nucleus. The signature of this process is an electron with energy nearly equal to the muon mass. Precise and robust measurement of the outgoing electron momentum, combined with other background rejection methods, is essential to the experiment. We rely on a low-mass straw tube tracker to achieve these goals. The tracking system must operate in a vacuum and a 1 Tesla magnetic field. We have chosen to use about 20,000 thin-wall Mylar straws held under tension to avoid the need for support within the active volume. In addition to measuring the distance from the wire by drift time, subnanosecond measurement of signal propagation time will be used to measure position along the wire. The charge will be measured using ADCs to provide particle identification capability.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2019

Searching for Short-Range Correlations in $^{40}AR$

The neutrino charged current (CC) cross section is critical for understanding neutrino oscillations as the flavor of a neutrino can only be determined by its CC interaction. As future generations of neutrino detectors will use argon as a target nucleus, it’s important to understand the influence that nuclear effects have on neutrino-nucleon cross sections. Short range correlations (SRCs) are an example of such an effect that are known to contribute non-trivially to the CC cross section. In MicroBooNE, a CC interaction with a correlated nucleon would lead to a 1 muon, 2 proton topology (CC2p). In order to study SRCs in MicroBooNE, It is crucial that the particle identification (PID) techniques used are efficient in identifying CC2p signals from background. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have shown great promise in their ability to distinguish objects in an image from a noisy background. We present here our work towards the development of a CNN for CC2p event selection and identification.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2017

Development of shashlik electromagnetic calorimeter prototype for SoLID

A shashlik electromagnetic calorimeter will be produced in Hall A of Jefferson Laboratory for Solenoidal large Intensity Device (SoLID) to measure the energy deposition of electrons and hadrons, and to provide particle identification after the energy of the accelerator was upgraded to 12 GeV. Tsinghua University is the member of Hall A collaboration in charge of development and production of the large shashlik electromagnetic calorimeter of SoLID. One module of that calorimeter is composed by 194 layers. Each layer consists of a 1.5 mm thick plastic scintillator put on top of a 0.5 mm thick lead plate. Scintillation light is read out by wave-length shifter fibers penetrating through the calorimeter modules longitudinally along the direction of flight of the impact particle. This paper describes the design and construction of that module, as well as a few optimization studies meant to improve its performance. A detailed Geant4 simulation also shows that an energy resolution of 5%/√ E (GeV) and a good containment for electromagnetic showers can be achieved, as well as some basic electron identification. In conclusion, a prototype of that module will be tested soon with an electron beam at JLab.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2015

The Heavy Photon Search experiment at Jefferson Laboratory

Many beyond Standard Model theories predict a new massive gauge boson, a.k.a. 'dark' or 'heavy photon', directly coupling to hidden sector particles with dark charge. The heavy photon is expected to mix with the Standard Model photon through kinetic mixing and therefore couple weakly to normal charge. The Heavy Photon Search (HPS) experiment will search for the heavy photon at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab), in the mass range 20-1000 MeV/c 2 and coupling to electric charge ϵ 2 = α'/α in the range 10 -5 to 10 -10 . HPS will look for the e + e - decay channel of heavy photons radiated by electron Bremsstrahlung, employing both invariant mass search and detached vertexing techniques. The experiment employs a compact forward spectrometer comprising silicon microstrip detectors for vertexing and tracking and an electromagnetic calorimeter for particle identification and triggering.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2017

Progress of the Charged Pion Semi-Inclusive Neutrino Charged Current Cross Section in NOvA

The NOvA experiment is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment designed to measure the rates of electron neutrino appearance and muon neutrino disappearance. The NOvA near detector is located at Fermilab, 800 m from the primary target and provides an excellent platform to measure and study neutrino-nucleus interactions. We present the status of the measurement of the double differential cross section with respect to muon kinematics for interactions involving charged pions in the final state, $\nu_{\mu} + N \rightarrow \mu + \pi^{+/-} + X$. We have derived a convolutional neural network-based approach for the identification of neutrino interactions with the specific final state topology. We present event classification efficiency studies using this particle identification and classification methodology, along with systematic uncertainties and prospects for the measurement.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2020

The GlueX beamline and detector

The GlueX experiment at Jefferson Lab has been designed to study photoproduction reactions with a 9-GeV linearly polarized photon beam. The energy and arrival time of beam photons are tagged using a scintillator hodoscope and a scintillating fiber array. The photon flux is determined using a pair spectrometer, while the linear polarization of the photon beam is determined using a polarimeter based on triplet photoproduction. Charged-particle tracks from interactions in the central target are analyzed in a solenoidal field using a central straw-tube drift chamber and six packages of planar chambers with cathode strips and drift wires. Electromagnetic showers are reconstructed in a cylindrical scintillating fiber calorimeter inside the magnet and a lead-glass array downstream. Charged particle identification is achieved by measuring energy loss in the wire chambers and using the flight time of particles between the target and detectors outside the magnet. The signals from all detectors are recorded with flash ADCs and/or pipeline TDCs into memories allowing trigger decisions with a latency of 3.3 $μs$. The detector operates routinely at trigger rates of 40 kHz and data rates of 600 megabytes per second. Here, we describe the photon beam, the GlueX detector components, electronics, data-acquisition and monitoring systems, and the performance of the experiment during the first three years of operation.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2023

Detectors and diagnostics for multiprobe radiography using high-energy short-pulse lasers

Multiprobe radiography requires the following diagnostic capabilities at minimum: radiographic source diagnostics, spectroscopy, imaging, and tomography diagnostics. Depending on the repetition rate of the radiation sources, the diagnostics may be a single-shot diagnostic, such as photographic (radiochromic and X-ray films for high energy photons) films, or a multiple-shot diagnostic for repetitive source operations, such as a high-speed framing camera. Due to the drastically different detector physics of electrons, photons at different energies (keV to 10s of MeV in the radiography context), heavy ions such as protons, alphas, and neutrons, see, for example, Ref. [1, 2] for an overview, different types or configurations of detectors and constructions may be required for multiprobe radiography applications. Some of the common detector metricsinclude, independent of the particle/photon species, sensitivities or efficiency, energy resolution, spatial or temporal resolutions and others. Some unique detection scenarios arise in a multiprobe radiography setting, for example, crosstalk mitigation and particle identification (ID) when X-ray and higher energy photons, relativistic electrons, neutrons, other hadrons, and heavy particles coexist at the detector location.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
NASA NTRS1973

Fast-neutron spectrometer developments

Li6 sandwich-type neutron spectrometer is equipped with proportional counter for particle identification. System uses current-sensitive preamplifiers to minimize pile-up of gamma-ray and particle pulses.

Moler, R. B.↗
DOE OSTI2026

The General Antiparticle Spectrometer (GAPS) Antarctic Balloon Payload

The General Antiparticle Spectrometer (GAPS) is an Antarctic stratospheric balloon mission designed to provide unmatched sensitivity to low-energy (<0.25 GeV/n) cosmic-ray antiprotons, antideuterons, and antihelium nuclei as signatures of dark matter. The distinctive GAPS particle identification technique relies on measuring the energy loss along the track of an incoming antinucleus as it slows down and is captured into an exotic atom, and then detecting the de-excitation X-rays and the nuclear annihilation products. This measurement is realized using a Tracker composed of more than 1000 custom silicon strip detectors and a plastic scintillator time-of-flight (TOF) system instrumenting more than 40m$^2$. Together, these subsystems provide the velocity and energy resolution, stopping power, particle tracking, and X-ray identification necessary to distinguish rare antinucleus signals from the abundant positive-nucleus backgrounds, all within the constraints of a high-altitude mission. A multi-loop capillary heat pipe system has been developed to maintain the tracker operating temperature with significant mass and power savings over a conventional pump-based system. The first GAPS science payload flew for 25 days during the 2025/26 NASA Antarctic balloon campaign. We detail the design, integration, and commissioning of the payload prior to flight.

Aoyama, Kazutaka [JAXA, Sagamihara]↗
DOE OSTI2023

Collaborative Research Towards a tonne-scale bolometer-based neutrinoless double beta decay experiment (Final Report)

Cryogenic bolometers are an excellent technology for neutrinoless double beta decay searches owing to their very high energy resolution and potential for high radiopurity. The current most advanced large-scale experiment using these detectors is the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE). The largest source of background in CUORE is degraded alpha particles, emitted from shallow depths of the detector holders, which can deposit a thermal energy signature similar to neutrinoless double beta decay. To mitigate this background, the CUPID concept (CUORE Upgrade with Particle IDentification) proposes to use scintillating cryogenic detectors. Detecting both the scintillation light and the thermal signal allows discrimination between alpha particle events and beta/gamma events. We report on the design and execution of R&D tests to optimize the design of the single detector module, in particular the scintillation light collection efficiency at cryogenic temperatures.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2017

Automated Proton Track Identification in MicroBooNE Using Gradient Boosted Decision Trees

MicroBooNE is a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) neutrino experiment that is currently running in the Booster Neutrino Beam at Fermilab. LArTPC technology allows for high-resolution, three-dimensional representations of neutrino interactions. A wide variety of software tools for automated reconstruction and selection of particle tracks in LArTPCs are actively being developed. Short, isolated proton tracks, the signal for low- momentum-transfer neutral current (NC) elastic events, are easily hidden in a large cosmic background. Detecting these low-energy tracks will allow us to probe interesting regions of the proton's spin structure. An effective method for selecting NC elastic events is to combine a highly efficient track reconstruction algorithm to find all candidate tracks with highly accurate particle identification using a machine learning algorithm. We present our work on particle track classification using gradient tree boosting software (XGBoost) and the performance on simulated neutrino data.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2025

Performance of Muon Neutrino Reconstruction at ICARUS using SPINE Machine Learning.

ICARUS is a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) neutrino experiment at Fermilab. Located ~600 m from the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) target, it serves as the far detector in the Short-Baseline Neutrino (SBN) Program. The primary objective of the SBN Program is to probe neutrino oscillation physics at short baselines using multiple detectors, including measurements of both muon neutrino disappearance and electron neutrino appearance. A key requirement for the neutrino oscillation measurements is robust event reconstruction, including accurate and precise particle identification (PID) and kinematic reconstruction across a wide range of topologies. To achieve the required performance, we employ the SPINE (“Scalable Particle Imaging with Neural Embeddings”) package, a state-of-the-art machine learning reconstruction framework. This talk presents the status of muon neutrino reconstruction using SPINE at ICARUS, including the evaluation of reconstruction performance that will enable the full physics program at ICARUS and at the SBN Program.

Totani, Dante [Colorado State U.] (ORCID:000000019↗
NASA NTRS1971

Nuclear tracks in lunar samples

An attempt is made to relate the appearance of an etched tract to the atomic number and velocity of the ion that left it using 10 MeV/nucleon Kr beams and 6 MeV/nucleon Zn beams. It was found that the etching rate along a tract in minerals and glass is a monototonic function of ionization rate thus, making particle identification possible. Results show the following were present in lunar samples: superheavy elements, cosmic rays with z greater than 26, and solar flare particles in Surveyor glass.

Price, P. B.↗
DOE OSTI2020

Probing energetic light dark matter with multi-particle tracks signatures at DUNE

The search for relativistic scattering signals of cosmogenic light dark matter at terrestrial detectors has received increasing attention as an alternative approach to probe dark-sector physics. Large-volume neutrino experiments are well motivated for searches of dark matter that interacts very weakly with Standard Model particles and/or that exhibits a small incoming flux. We perform a dedicated signal sensitivity study for a detector similar to the one proposed by the DUNE Collaboration for cosmogenic dark-matter signals resulting from a non-minimal multi-particle dark-sector scenario. The liquid argon time projection chamber technology adopted for the DUNE detectors is particularly suited for searching for complicated signatures owing to good measurement resolution and particle identification, as well as dE/dx measurements to recognize merged tracks. Taking inelastic boosted dark matter as our benchmark scenario that allows for multiple visible particles in the final state, we demonstrate that the DUNE far detectors have a great potential for probing scattering signals induced by relativistic light dark matter. Detector effects and backgrounds have been estimated and taken into account. Model-dependent and model-independent expected sensitivity limits for a DUNE-like detector are presented.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
NASA NTRS2007

Genesis Concentrator Target Particle Contamination Mapping and Material Identification

The majority of surface particles were found to be < 5 microns in diameter with increasing numbers close to the optical resolution limit of 0.3 microns. Acceleration grid EDS results show that the majority of materials appear to be from the SRC shell and SLA materials which include carbon-carbon fibers and Si-rich microspheres in a possible silicone binder. Other major debris material from the SRC included white paint, kapton, collector array fragments, and Al. Image analysis also revealed that SRC materials were also found mixed with the Utah mud and salt deposits. The EDS analysis of the acceleration grid showed that particles < 1 m where generally carbon based particles. Chemical cleaning techniques with Xylene and HF in an ultrasonic bath are currently being investigated for removal of small particles by the Genesis science team as well as ultra-pure water megasonic cleaning by the JSC team [4]. Removal of organic contamination from target materials is also being investigated by the science team with the use of UV-ozone cleaning devices at JSC and Open University [5]. In preparation for solar wind oxygen analyses at UCLA and Open University [1, 2], surface particle contamination on three Genesis concentrator targets was closely examined to evaluate cleaning strategies. Two silicon carbide (Genesis sample # 60001 and 60003) and one chemical vapor deposited (CVD) 13C concentrator target (60002) were imaged and mosaic mapped with optical microscopes. The resulting full target mosaic images and particle feature maps were subsequently compared with non-flight, but flight-like, concentrator targets and sample return capsule (SRC) materials. Contamination found on the flown concentrator acceleration grid was further examined using a scanning electron microscope (SEM). Energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) for particle identification was subsequently compared with the optical images from the flown targets. Figure 1 show that all three targets imaged in this report are fully intact and do not show any signs of material fractures. However, previous ellipsometry results and overview imaging of both flown SiC targets show a solar wind irradiation gradient from the center focal point to the outer edge [3]. In addition, due to the hard landing, each target has experienced varying degrees of impacts, scratches, and particle debris from the spacecraft and Utah impact site.

Calaway, Michael J.↗
NASA NTRS1989

Minimum length Pb/SCIN detector for efficient cosmic ray identification

A study was made of the performance of a minimal length cosmic ray shower detector that would be light enough for space flight and would provide efficient identification of positions and protons. Cosmic ray positions are mainly produced in the decay chain of: Pion yields Muon yields Positron and they provide a measure of the matter density traversed by primary protons. Present positron flux measurements are consistent with the Leaky Box and Halo models for sources of cosmic rays. Abundant protons in the space environment are a significant source of background that would wash out the positron signal. Protons and positrons produced very distictive showers of particles when they enter matter; many studies have been published on their behavior on large calorimeter detectors. The challenge is to determine the minimal material necessary (minimal calorimeter depth) for positive particles identification. The primary instrument for the investigation is the Monte Carlo code GEANT, a library of programs from CERN that can be used to model experimental geometry, detector responses and particle interaction processes. The use of the Monte Carlo approach is crucial since statistical fluctuations in shower shape are significant. Studies conducted during the 1988 summer program showed that straightforward approaches to the problem achieved 85 to 90 percent correct identification, but left a residue of 10 to 15 percent misidentified particles. This percentage improved to a few percent when multiple shower-cut criteria were applied to the data. This summer, the same study was extended to employ several physical and statistical methods of identifying response of the calorimeter and the efficiency of the optimal shower cuts to off-normal incidence particle was determined.

Snyder, H. David↗