Neutrino Event Selection in the MicroBooNE Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber using Wire-Cell 3-D Imaging, Clustering, and Charge-Light Matching

MicroBooNE Collaboration and Blake, A. and Devitt, D. and Nowak, J. and Thorpe, C. (2021) Neutrino Event Selection in the MicroBooNE Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber using Wire-Cell 3-D Imaging, Clustering, and Charge-Light Matching. Journal of Instrumentation, 16. ISSN 1748-0221

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Abstract

An accurate and efficient event reconstruction is required to realize the full scientific capability of liquid argon time projection chambers (LArTPCs). The current and future neutrino experiments that rely on massive LArTPCs create a need for new ideas and reconstruction approaches. Wire-Cell, proposed in recent years, is a novel tomographic event reconstruction method for LArTPCs. The Wire-Cell 3D imaging approach capitalizes on charge, sparsity, time, and geometry information to reconstruct a topology-agnostic 3D image of the ionization electrons prior to pattern recognition. A second novel method, the many-to-many charge-light matching, then pairs the TPC charge activity to the detected scintillation light signal, thus enabling a powerful rejection of cosmic-ray muons in the MicroBooNE detector. A robust processing of the scintillation light signal and an appropriate clustering of the 3D space points are fundamental to this technique. In this paper, we describe the principles and algorithms of these techniques and their successful application in the MicroBooNE experiment. A quantitative evaluation of the performance of these techniques is presented. Using these techniques, a 95% efficient pre-selection of neutrino charged-current events is achieved with a 30-fold reduction of non-beam-coincident cosmic-ray muons, and about 80% of the selected neutrino charged-current events are well reconstructed with high completeness (at least 70%) and purity (at least 80%).