Speaker
Description
Atmospheric neutrinos play a crucial role in a wide range of physics analyses at Super-Kamiokande. They serve as signals for testing the neutrino mass ordering, while also contributing as backgrounds in searches for rare events such as proton decay, supernova neutrinos, and cosmic dark matter interactions. Tagging neutrons in atmospheric neutrino interactions significantly enhances these analyses by enabling the separation of antineutrino interactions and improving neutrino energy reconstruction as a valuable probe of hadronic showers. However, predicting the total number of observable neutrons depends on hadron-nucleus interaction modeling in water, and limited experimental data introduces substantial uncertainties. Here, we present a measurement of neutron production from atmospheric neutrino interactions in the O(0.1-1) GeV energy range. The results are compared with predictions from various combinations of intranuclear cascade and nuclear de-excitation models. We discuss key model ingredients required to describe our data and how improved constraints on these models enhance future physics analyses involving atmospheric neutrinos.
| Collaboration(s) | Super-Kamiokande |
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