Inclusive Search for Anomalous Single-Photon Production in MicroBooNE

Abstract

We present an inclusive search for anomalous production of single-photon events from neutrino interactions in the MicroBooNE experiment. The search and its signal definition are motivated by the previous observation of a low-energy excess of electromagnetic shower events from the MiniBooNE experiment. We use the Wire-Cell reconstruction framework to select a sample of inclusive single-photon final-state interactions with a final efficiency and purity of 7.0% and 40.2%, respectively. We leverage simultaneous measurements of sidebands of charged current ${\nu }_{\mu }$ interactions and neutral current interactions producing ${\pi }^0$ mesons to constrain signal and background predictions and reduce uncertainties. We perform a blind analysis using a dataset collected from February 2016 to July 2018, corresponding to an exposure of $6.34\times 10^{20}$ protons on target from the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) at Fermilab. In the full signal region, we observe agreement between the data and the prediction, with a goodness-of-fit $p$-value of 0.11. We then isolate a sub-sample of these events containing no visible protons, and observe $93\pm 22\text{(stat.)}\pm 35\text{(syst.)}$ data events above prediction, corresponding to just above $2\sigma$ local significance, concentrated at shower energies below 600 MeV.

9 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (32)

• Improved Search for ${\bar{\nu }}_{\mu }\to {\bar{\nu }}_e$ Oscillations in the MiniBooNE Experiment
• A Search for Electron Neutrino Appearance at the Delta m**2 ~ 1 eV**2 Scale
• Significant Excess of ElectronLike Events in the MiniBooNE Short-Baseline Neutrino Experiment
• Design and Construction of the MicroBooNE Detector
• Unexplained Excess of Electron-Like Events From a 1-GeV Neutrino Beam
• The Neutrino Flux prediction at MiniBooNE
• Updated MiniBooNE Neutrino Oscillation Results with Increased Data and New Background Studies
• Dark Neutrino Portal to Explain MiniBooNE excess
• The MiniBooNE Detector
• Ionization Electron Signal Processing in Single Phase LArTPCs II. Data/Simulation Comparison and Performance in MicroBooNE
• U(1)' mediated decays of heavy sterile neutrinos in MiniBooNE
• Resolution of puzzles from the LSND, KARMEN, and MiniBooNE experiments
• Neutrino-Nucleon Cross-Section Model Tuning in GENIE v3
• Ionization Electron Signal Processing in Single Phase LArTPCs I. Algorithm Description and Quantitative Evaluation with MicroBooNE Simulation
• Explaining $(g-2{)}_{\mu ,e}$, the KOTO anomaly and the MiniBooNE excess in an extended Higgs model with sterile neutrinos
• A Dark Seesaw Solution to Low Energy Anomalies: MiniBooNE, the muon $(g-2)$, and BaBar
• Combined Neyman-Pearson Chi-square: An Improved Approximation to the Poisson-likelihood Chi-square
• Decaying Sterile Neutrinos and the Short Baseline Oscillation Anomalies
• New CC0π GENIE Model Tune for MicroBooNE
• Novel Approach for Evaluating Detector-Related Uncertainties in a LArTPC Using MicroBooNE Data
• Search for an anomalous excess of charged-current quasi-elastic ${\nu }_e$ interactions with the MicroBooNE experiment using Deep-Learning-based reconstruction
• Two-Higgs doublet solution to the LSND, MiniBooNE and muon $g-2$ anomalies
• Search for Neutrino-Induced Neutral Current $\Delta$ Radiative Decay in MicroBooNE and a First Test of the MiniBooNE Low Energy Excess Under a Single-Photon Hypothesis
• Three-dimensional Imaging for Large LArTPCs
• 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
• Explaining the MiniBooNE Anomalous Excess via Leptophilic ALP-Sterile Neutrino Coupling
• Wire-Cell 3D Pattern Recognition Techniques for Neutrino Event Reconstruction in Large LArTPCs: Algorithm Description and Quantitative Evaluation with MicroBooNE Simulation
• First simultaneous measurement of differential muon-neutrino charged-current cross sections on argon for final states with and without protons using MicroBooNE data
• A 17 MeV pseudoscalar and the LSND, MiniBooNE and ATOMKI anomalies
• Demonstration of new MeV-scale capabilities in large neutrino LArTPCs using ambient radiogenic and cosmogenic activity in MicroBooNE
• Search for an Anomalous Production of Charged-Current ${\nu }_e$ Interactions Without Visible Pions Across Multiple Kinematic Observables in MicroBooNE