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

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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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Demonstration of new MeV-scale capabilities in large neutrino LArTPCs using ambient radiogenic and cosmogenic activity in MicroBooNE
• Measurement of neutron production in atmospheric neutrino interactions at Super-Kamiokande
• First study of neutrino angle reconstruction using quasielastic-like interactions in MicroBooNE