DPF2015

4-8 August 2015
America/Detroit timezone

Measurement of the $\nu_\mu$ Charged Current Quasielastic Scattering Cross Section on Water with the T2K Off-Axis Near Detector

6 Aug 2015, 14:40
20m
Hussey (Michigan League)

Hussey

Michigan League

Neutrino Experiment

Speaker

Jeremy Lopez (University of Colorado at Boulder)

Description

The T2K experiment is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment that uses an off-axis neutrino beam from the J-PARC accelerator to measure $\nu_e$ appearance and $\nu_\mu$ disappearance at Super-Kamiokande, 295 km away. The $\nu_\mu$ disappearance analysis at Super-Kamiokande relies on measurements of charged current quasielastic (CCQE) scattering events on water. The ND280 off-axis near detector is used to constrain the neutrino flux at Super-Kamiokande and also to measure a variety of neutrino cross sections. This talk will present ongoing work toward measuring the cross section of $\nu_\mu$ CCQE-like scattering events on water using ND280. The selection identifies events with a muon and any number of nucleons but no pions. While much of ND280 is composed of bars of scintillating plastic, the $\pi^0$ Detector (PØD), one of the subdetectors comprising ND280, contains target volumes that may be filled with water or left as empty air volumes. Our analysis will apply an iterative Bayesian unfolding method to reconstruct the momentum and angle distribution of selected muons in CCQE-like events for each PØD water target configuration. We plan to extract the cross section on water alone by subtracting the result with empty water targets from the result with filled water targets.
Oral or Poster Presentation Oral

Primary authors

Alysia Marino (University of Colorado at Boulder) Jeremy Lopez (University of Colorado at Boulder) Tianlu Yuan (University of Colorado at Boulder)