First Measurement of Charged Current Muon Neutrino-Induced $K^+$ Production on Argon using the MicroBooNE Detector

Blake, A. and Gu, L. and Mahmud, T. and Mawby, I. and Nowak, J. and Patel, N. and Pophale, I. (2025) First Measurement of Charged Current Muon Neutrino-Induced $K^+$ Production on Argon using the MicroBooNE Detector. Physical review letters. ISSN 1079-7114 (In Press)

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Abstract

The MicroBooNE experiment is an 85 tonne active mass liquid argon time projection chamber neutrino detector exposed to the on-axis Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) at Fermilab. One of MicroBooNE's physics goals is the precise measurement of neutrino interactions on argon in the 1 GeV energy regime. Building on the capabilities of the MicroBooNE detector, this analysis identifies $K^{+}$ mesons, a key signature for the study of strange particle production in neutrino interactions. This measurement is furthermore valuable for background estimation for future nucleon decay searches and for improved reconstruction and particle identification capabilities in experiments such as the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). In this letter, we present the first-ever measurement of a flux-integrated cross section for charged-current muon neutrino induced $K^{+}$ production on argon nuclei, determined to be 7.93 $\pm$ 3.27 (stat.) $\pm$ 2.92 (syst.) $\times~10^{-42}\;$ cm$^2$/nucleon based on an analysis of 6.88$\times10^{20}$ protons on target.