MicroBooNE
Subtitle: The Search For The MiniBooNE Low Energy Excess
By: David Kaleko
Publisher: [publisher not identified]
Published: 2017
Place of publication: [New York, N.Y.?]
Language: eng
Description: This thesis describes work towards the search for a low energy excess of electromagnetic events in the MicroBooNE detector. A background primer on the current state of neutrino physics is provided, including a description of the MiniBooNE detector and its published observation of an excess of electromagnetic events at low energies. A description of the MicroBooNE Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) detector is given, along with a description of the event selection and reconstruction algorithms developed to select electron neutrino charge-current interactions. A MiniBooNE-like signal is simulated in MicroBooNE with assumptions about the origin of the excess, and the sensitivity to observe such a signal above backgrounds in MicroBooNE is computed. An additional analysis is presented which constrains a dominant background in the MicroBooNE low energy excess search: the beam-intrinsic electron neutrino interactions which come from kaon decay in the beam-line. An essential step in this analysis is to reconstruct the energy of muon neutrino charge-current interactions in which the muon produced in the interaction escapes the detector.

A publication detailing the algorithm which leverages the phenomenon of multiple Coulomb scattering to reconstruct the energy of escaping muons is provided as an appendix.
Notes: Department: Physics.

Thesis advisor: Michael Herman Shaevitz.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 2017.