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

Abstract

We report the measurement of the differential cross section $d^{2}σ(E_ν)/ d\cos(θ_μ) dP_μ$ 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.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: Distribution of data and prediction over the 2D reconstructed binning of $\{ E_{\mathrm{had}}^{\mathrm{rec}}, \cos(\theta^{\mathrm{rec}}_{\mu}) \}$ for fully contained events (partially contained event distributions are shown in the supplemental material suppl). The MicroBooNE model prediction, including before (red) and after (blue) applying the measurement of the data distribution over $\{ P^{\mathrm{rec}}_{\mu}, \cos(\theta^{\mathrm{rec}}_{\mu}) \}$ as a constraint, is compared to data.
• Figure 2: Unfolded measurement of the inclusive $\nu_{\mu}$ CC double-differential cross section on argon as a function of neutrino energy and nominal and tuned MicroBooNE model predictions are shown across the $\{P_{\mu}, \cos(\theta_{\mu})\}$ binning within each $E_{\nu}$ slice. Angle slices are labeled and separated by gray lines, with bin edges $\{ -1, -0.5, 0, 0.27, 0.45, 0.62, 0.76, 0.86, 0.94, 1 \}$. A complete description of the phase space location of each analysis bin is given in the supplemental material suppl. Uncertainties on the measurement as well as the MicroBooNE model are combined as error bars on the measurement and both included in the $\chi^{2}$ computation.
• Figure 3: Unfolded measurement of the inclusive $\nu_{\mu}$ CC triple-differential cross section on argon and various model predictions are shown across the ${P_{\mu}, \cos(\theta_{\mu})}$ binning within each $E_{\mathrm{vis}}$ slice. Angle slices are labeled and separated by gray lines, with bin edges $\{ -1, -0.5, 0, 0.27, 0.45, 0.62, 0.76, 0.86, 0.94, 1 \}$. A complete description of the phase space location of each analysis bin and a comparison to the MicroBooNE model is given in the supplemental material suppl. The highest $E_{\mathrm{vis}}$ slice is magnified by a factor of 10 for visibility.
• Figure 4: The ratio of the diagonal uncertainty to the measurement value in each bin is shown, including breakdown by source of the uncertainty. Angle slices are labeled and separated by gray lines, with bin edges $\{ -1, -0.5, 0, 0.27, 0.45, 0.62, 0.76, 0.86, 0.94, 1 \}$. A complete description of the phase space location of each analysis bin is given in the supplemental material.