Speaker
Description
The Neutrino Platform at CERN hosts large-scale prototypes for DUNE’s Far Detector, aligned with the SPS beamline pointed towards the North Area.
The 400 GeV/c SPS protons impacting on the T2 target area may produce exotic particles that could travel ~700 meters to the detectors, in addition to a substantial flux of neutrinos.
Simulations of the neutrino flux predict that thousands of neutrino interactions are expected per week in the active volume of ProtoDUNE-HD spanning energies from a few GeV up to 180 GeV, constituting the main background for such search.
The first step towards establishing a Beyond Standard Model physics program at the Neutrino Platform is therefore to observe neutrinos originating from the SPS beam. A sample of high-energy neutrino events in a DUNE FD-like LArTPC may also be of broader use to the DUNE collaboration. For example, by testing the performance of reconstruction algorithms on highly-energetic neutrino interactions with large hadronic showers.
An initial neutrino search was performed by developing filters to remove cosmic events. After filtering, the remaining events were hand-scanned to identify neutrino candidates amongst the residual cosmic background.
Out of the available ProtoDUNE-HD data, approximately 29 neutrino candidates were identified, and none were found in the beam-off control data.
The visual scanning proved to be efficient as a first step, but now a full systematic analysis is under development that will use all available data, large Monte Carlo samples and full event reconstruction, with the aim of confirming whether ProtoDUNE-HD is capable of observing feebly interacting particles originating from the SPS beam.
