First Measurement of Energy-Dependent Inclusive Muon Neutrino Charged-Current Cross Sections on Argon with the MicroBooNE Detector

TL;DR

This paper presents the first measurement of energy-dependent inclusive muon neutrino charged-current cross sections on argon using the MicroBooNE detector, validating energy reconstruction and modeling of missing hadronic energy.

Contribution

It provides the first measurements of both total and differential neutrino-argon cross sections with validated energy reconstruction methods.

Findings

Validated the mapping between true and reconstructed neutrino energies.

Confirmed the modeling of missing hadronic energy and its uncertainties.

Measured energy-dependent total cross sections and flux-averaged differential cross sections.

Abstract

We report a measurement of the energy-dependent total charged-current cross section $\sigma\left(E_\nu\right)$ for inclusive muon neutrinos scattering on argon, as well as measurements of flux-averaged differential cross sections as a function of muon energy and hadronic energy transfer ($\nu$). Data corresponding to 5.3$\times$10$^{19}$ protons on target of exposure were collected using the MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber located in the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Beam with a mean neutrino energy of approximately 0.8 GeV. The mapping between the true neutrino energy $E_\nu$ and reconstructed neutrino energy $E^{rec}_\nu$ and between the energy transfer $\nu$ and reconstructed hadronic energy $E^{rec}_{had}$ are validated by comparing the data and Monte Carlo (MC) predictions. In particular, the modeling of the missing hadronic energy and its associated uncertainties are verified by a new method that compares the $E^{rec}_{had}$ distributions between data and an MC prediction after constraining the reconstructed muon kinematic distributions, energy and polar angle, to those of data. The success of this validation gives confidence that the missing energy in the MicroBooNE detector is well-modeled and underpins first-time measurements of both the total cross section $\sigma\left(E_\nu\right)$ and the differential cross section $d\sigma/d\nu$ on argon.