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

Journal article

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.

Authors: Abratenko, P; Alterkait, O; Aldana, DA; Arellano, L; Asaadi, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: SpringerOpen
• Journal: The European Physical Journal C
• Volume: 84
• Issue: 10
• Article number: 1052
• Publication date: 2024-10-14
• Acceptance date: 2024-09-25
• DOI: 10.1140/epjc/s10052-024-13423-z
• EISSN: 1434-6052
• Language: English