Detector calibration using through going and stopping muons in the MicroBooNE LArTPC

UNSPECIFIED (2018) Detector calibration using through going and stopping muons in the MicroBooNE LArTPC. Other. UNSPECIFIED.

Abstract

The MicroBooNE experiment at Fermilab uses a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) in the Booster Neutrino Beam to search for anomalous production of electron-neutrino-like events and to study neutrino-argon cross sections in the 1 GeV neutrino energy regime. The detector operates at 0.273 kV/cm drift electric field and its TPC has an active mass of 85 tons of liquid argon. One of the main advantages of the LArTPC technology is its ability to reconstruct both particle track direction and energy with very high precision. Effects such as misconfigured or cross-connected TPC wires, space charge effects, electron attenuation, diffusion, and recombination can worsen the energy resolution of the detector. Therefore the detector calibration is of utmost importance to get the correct dE/dx (energy loss per unit track length) measurement. This is crucial for particle identification and in particular the separation of electrons and photons, essential for oscillation analyses. Here we describe a method developed for MicroBooNE to calibrate the detector by correcting for the above mentioned effects. In this analysis first we make the detector response uniform throughout the detector and time using through-going muons. Next stopping muons are used to determine the energy scale and convert dQ/dx to dE/dx.