Search for an Anomalous Production of Charged-Current $ν_e$ Interactions Without Visible Pions Across Multiple Kinematic Observables

Blake, A. and Gu, L. and Mahmud, T. and Mawby, I. and Nowak, J. and Patel, N. and Pophale, I. (2025) Search for an Anomalous Production of Charged-Current $ν_e$ Interactions Without Visible Pions Across Multiple Kinematic Observables. Physical review letters. ISSN 1079-7114 (In Press)

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Abstract

This Letter presents an investigation of low-energy electron-neutrino interactions in the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Beam by the MicroBooNE experiment, motivated by the excess of electron-neutrino-like events observed by the MiniBooNE experiment. This is the first measurement to use data from all five years of operation of the MicroBooNE experiment, corresponding to an exposure of $1.11\times 10^{21}$ protons on target, a $70\%$ increase on past results. Two samples of electron neutrino interactions without visible pions are used, one with visible protons and one without any visible protons. MicroBooNE data is compared to two empirical models that modify the predicted rate of electron-neutrino interactions in different variables in the simulation to match the unfolded MiniBooNE low energy excess. In the first model, this unfolding is performed as a function of electron neutrino energy, while the second model aims to match the observed shower energy and angle distributions of the MiniBooNE excess. This measurement excludes an electron-like interpretation of the MiniBooNE excess based on these models at $> 99\%$ CL$_\mathrm{s}$ in all kinematic variables.