Jul 4 – 11, 2018
COEX, SEOUL
Asia/Seoul timezone

First Measurement of Monoenergetic Muon Neutrino Charged Current Interactions

Jul 6, 2018, 2:15 PM
15m
202 (COEX, Seoul)

202

COEX, Seoul

Parallel Neutrino Physics Neutrino Physics

Speaker

Johnathon Jordan (University of Michigan)

Description

We report the first measurement of monoenergetic muon neutrino charged current interactions. MiniBooNE has isolated 236 MeV muon neutrino events originating from charged kaon decay at rest ($K^+→μ^+ν_μ$) at the NuMI beamline absorber. These signal $ν_μ$-carbon events are distinguished from primarily pion decay in flight $ν_μ$ and $\overline{ν}_μ$ backgrounds produced at the target station and decay pipe using their arrival time and reconstructed muon energy. The significance of the signal observation is at the 3.9σ level. The muon kinetic energy, neutrino-nucleus energy transfer ($ω=E_ν−E_μ$), and total cross section for these events is extracted. This result is the first known-energy, weak-interaction-only probe of the nucleus to yield a measurement of ω using neutrinos, a quantity thus far only accessible through electron scattering.

Primary authors

Joshua Spitz (University of Michigan) Johnathon Jordan (University of Michigan)

Presentation materials