Measurement of cosmic-ray reconstruction efficiencies in the MicroBooNE LArTPC using a small external cosmic-ray counter

Abstract

The MicroBooNE detector is a liquid argon time projection chamber at Fermilab designed to study short-baseline neutrino oscillations and neutrino-argon interaction cross-section. Due to its location near the surface, a good understanding of cosmic muons as a source of backgrounds is of fundamental importance for the experiment. We present a method of using an external 0.5 m (L) x 0.5 m (W) muon counter stack, installed above the main detector, to determine the cosmic-ray reconstruction efficiency in MicroBooNE. Data are acquired with this external muon counter stack placed in three different positions, corresponding to cosmic rays intersecting different parts of the detector. The data reconstruction efficiency of tracks in the detector is found to be ${\epsilon }_{\mathrm{data}}=(97.1\pm 0.1(\mathrm{stat})\pm 1.4(\mathrm{sys}))\%$, in good agreement with the Monte Carlo reconstruction efficiency ${\epsilon }_{\mathrm{MC}}=(97.4\pm 0.1)\%$. This analysis represents a small-scale demonstration of the method that can be used with future data coming from a recently installed cosmic-ray tagger system, which will be able to tag $\approx 80\%$ of the cosmic rays passing through the MicroBooNE detector.

arXiv comment19 pages, 12 figures

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• Design and Construction of the MicroBooNE Detector
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• The Pandora Software Development Kit for Pattern Recognition
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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Ionization Electron Signal Processing in Single Phase LArTPCs II. Data/Simulation Comparison and Performance in MicroBooNE
• Ionization Electron Signal Processing in Single Phase LArTPCs I. Algorithm Description and Quantitative Evaluation with MicroBooNE Simulation
• Sub-GeV Atmospheric Neutrinos and CP-Violation in DUNE
• Design and construction of the MicroBooNE Cosmic Ray Tagger system
• High-performance Generic Neutrino Detection in a LArTPC near the Earth's Surface with the MicroBooNE Detector
• Cosmic Ray Background Rejection with Wire-Cell LArTPC Event Reconstruction in the MicroBooNE Detector
• Measurement of the Atmospheric Muon Rate with the MicroBooNE Liquid Argon TPC
• Exploring the detection of AQNs in large liquid detectors