Measurement of three-dimensional inclusive muon-neutrino charged-current cross sections on argon with the MicroBooNE detector

TL;DR

This paper presents a detailed measurement of muon-neutrino charged-current interactions on argon, providing comprehensive three-dimensional cross sections that enhance understanding for future neutrino oscillation experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a validated method for unfolding three-dimensional neutrino interaction data on argon, improving accuracy in modeling missing energy and kinematic reconstruction.

Findings

Successful validation of reconstructed to true neutrino energy mapping

Unfolded cross sections cover extensive phase space

Model predictions compared across different phase-space regions

Abstract

We report the measurement of the differential cross section $d^{2}\sigma (E_{\nu})/ d\cos(\theta_{\mu}) dP_{\mu}$ for inclusive muon-neutrino charged-current scattering on argon. This measurement utilizes data from 6.4$\times10^{20}$ protons on target of exposure collected using the MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber located along the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Beam with a mean neutrino energy of approximately 0.8~GeV. The mapping from reconstructed kinematics to truth quantities, particularly from reconstructed to true neutrino energy, is validated within uncertainties by comparing the distribution of reconstructed hadronic energy in data to that of the model prediction in different muon scattering angle bins after applying a conditional constraint from the muon momentum distribution in data. The success of this validation gives confidence that the missing energy in the MicroBooNE detector is well-modeled within uncertainties in simulation, enabling the unfolding to a three-dimensional measurement over muon momentum, muon scattering angle, and neutrino energy. The unfolded measurement covers an extensive phase space, providing a wealth of information useful for future liquid argon time projection chamber experiments measuring neutrino oscillations. Comparisons against a number of commonly used model predictions are included and their performance in different parts of the available phase-space is discussed.