Particle Physics Seminar

Abstract:
The liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) is an advanced technology in current and future neutrino oscillation experiments to detect neutrinos with its superb imaging and calorimetry capabilities in a fully active volume. The MicroBooNE detector, which is a single-phase LArTPC of 85-ton active mass near the Earth's surface, was built to primarily measure the neutrino-argon scattering cross sections and to investigate the low energy excess (LEE) of electron neutrino charged-current events, using the Booster Neutrino Beam at Fermilab. The cross section measurement is key input to all LArTPC detectors and the search for LEE is of great scientific interest regarding the existence of light sterile neutrinos.
In this talk, an end-to-end analysis procedure to detect electron neutrino charged-current events based on the novel Wire-Cell reconstruction paradigm will be described which shows a decent selection efficiency and purity for both electron and muon neutrino charged-current events. In this analysis, the unique challenges of the large cosmic-ray muon backgrounds and the overwhelming charged-current and neutral-current backgrounds from the beam muon neutrinos are well addressed with years effort in developing event reconstruction and pattern recognition algorithms for the LArTPC.
Sensitivity study of this LEE search with full systematic uncertainties and the performance on artificially-generated datasets will be presented. Interesting observations related to other physics topics alongside the LEE analysis will also be discussed.