A Measurement of Single Charged Pion Production in MicroBooNE

Devitt, Alesha and Nowak, Jaroslaw and Blake, Andrew (2023) A Measurement of Single Charged Pion Production in MicroBooNE. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

MicroBooNE is a 170 ton liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) located at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). It operated in the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) at a mean neutrino energy of 0.8 GeV, taking data from 2015 to 2021. It is the first large LArTPC to gather high statistics neutrino data, and as such it serves an important role in the further development of this technology, which is planned for use in a number of future experiments. Additionally, MicroBooNE has two main physics goals: resolving the cause of the low energy excess observed by MiniBooNE, and measuring neutrino cross sections on argon.Neutrino interactions with heavy nuclei like argon are significantly affected by nuclear effects and final state interactions (FSI), which we lack a complete understanding of. Measuring additional cross section data is critically important for providing further insights. Next generation experiments aim to answer many open questions in neutrino physics, and will rely on precision measurements to do so. This thesis serves this objective, presenting the first measurement of single charged pion production (CC1π+) in MicroBooNE. A detailed discussion of this process is given, including descriptions of the event selection, estimation of systematic uncertainties, and extraction of the cross section result itself. The total, flux-integrated CC1π+ cross section on argon per nucleon is measured to be 0.788 ± 0.079 (stat.) ± 0.261 (syst.) × 10-39 cm2.