Shaw, Dave and O'Keeffe, Helen (2018) A study of neutral pion production from charged-current muon-neutrino interactions in the T2K near detector (Tracker + ECal). PhD thesis, Lancaster University.
2018ShawPhD.pdf - Published Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.
Download (32MB)
Abstract
Tokai to Kamioka (T2K) is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment, whose beam is produced at the J-PARC accelerator complex in Tokai, Japan. This beam is sampled by a near detector, ND280, 280 m from the beam origin and a far detector, Super-Kamiokande, 295 km from the beam origin. The primary systematic uncertainties dominating the oscillation analyses for T2K are related to the neutrino beam flux, cross-section and final state interaction uncertainties. Within this thesis, a first attempt is made to develop an analysis in the ND280 highland2 analysis framework which selects muon-neutrino induced charged-current events containing at least one Pi0. In order to investigate potential differences in the conversion channels of the Pi0 decays, exclusively those which finally convert in the Tracker + ECal regions of the ND280 are considered. The analysis presented selects muon-neutrino CCPi0 inclusive events in the ND280, reconstructed in the Tracker + ECal regions, with an efficiency of 3.2 +/- 0.06% and a purity of 71.7 +/- 0.71%. The analysis detailed within was carried out using data taken from the T2K run periods 2 - 4, which corresponds to 55.19 X 10^19 protons on target (P.O.T). This leads to a prediction of 262.1 +/- 32.8 (Stat. + Det. + Flux + Model Error) events being selected for the NEUT Monte-Carlo (MC), and a total of 316 +/- 17.8 events being selected within the real data. These figures imply general agreement between Monte Carlo and real data. A number of suggestions for future work are described. It is expected that the implementation of these will allow a total CC1Pi0 inclusive final state cross-section measurement and also allow this work to be used in data samples used to constrain future T2K oscillation analyses. Secondarily, a portion of this thesis describes work completed by the author which focused on the implementation of a software solution to a hardware problem, which arised during construction of the ECal modules which form part of the ND280.