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

This document was prepared by the MicroBooNE Collaboration using the resources of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), a U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, HEP User Facility. Fermilab is managed by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC (FRA), acting under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359. MicroBooNE is supported by the following: the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Offices of High Energy Physics and Nuclear Physics; the U.S. National Science Foundation; the Swiss National Science Foundation; the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), part of the United Kingdom Research and Innovation; the Royal Society (United Kingdom); and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions. Additional support for the laser calibration system and cosmic ray tagger was provided by the Albert Einstein Center for Fundamental Physics, Bern, Switzerland. We also acknowledge the contributions of technical and scientific staff to the design, construction, and operation of the MicroBooNE detector as well as the contributions of past collaborators to the development of MicroBooNE analyses, without whom this work would not have been possible.
We report a measurement of the energy-dependent total charged-current cross section σ(Eν) 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 (ν). Data corresponding to 5.3×1019 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 Eν and reconstructed neutrino energy Erecν and between the energy transfer ν and reconstructed hadronic energy Erechad 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 Erechad distributions between data and a 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 σ(Eν) and the differential cross section dσ/dν on argon.
High Energy Physics and Nuclear Physics
United Kingdom Research and Innovation
National Science Foundation
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Science
Science and Technology Facilities Council
Royal Society
Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung