Muon-neutrino charged-current cross sections from MicroBooNE: a detailed investigation of final states with and without protons

• Ben Bogart (University of Michigan)

Room: Graduate Building D-122 Studying neutrino flavor oscillations through measurements of neutrino-nucleus interactions is the backbone of experimental neutrino physics and will enable the determination of the neutrino mass ordering and the degree of CP violation in the lepton sector. A precise understanding of neutrino-nucleon cross sections is needed in order to properly interpret these measurements in current and future experiments. To help fill this need, MicroBooNE has produced a comprehensive set of cross section measurements which simultaneously probe the leptonic and hadronic systems by dividing the inclusive channel into final states with and without protons. The MicroBooNe detector, coupled with topographical event reconstruction techniques, provides MeV-level detection threshold calorimetry and mm-resolution three-dimensional images of neutrino interactions, enabling these detailed studies of the neutrino-nucleon reaction products. Data-driven model validation utilizing the conditional constraint formalism is employed to detect mismodeling that may bias the nominal flux averaged cross section results, which are extracted with the Wiener-SVD unfolding method. These are first differential muon neutrino-argon cross section measurements made simultaneously for final states with and without protons, and thus they provide novel information that will help stimulate the improvement of event generator modeling. In particular, these results reveal that widely used event generator mismodel final states without protons. This is possibly due to insufficient treatment of final state interactions and a better incorporation of in-medium effects improves the theoretical description of this data.