Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2017
Volume 62, Number 1
Saturday–Tuesday, January 28–31, 2017; Washington, DC
Session S11: Neutrino Detector II |
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Sponsoring Units: DPF Chair: Dmitri Denisov, FermiLab Room: Roosevelt 3 |
Monday, January 30, 2017 1:30PM - 1:42PM |
S11.00001: Uncontained $\nu_{\mu}$ charged-current quasi-elastic events at the NOvA far detector Jose Sepulveda-Quiroz NOvA is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment that uses an upgraded neutrino beam from Fermilab and two highly active, segmented, liquid scintillator off-axis detectors that offer a remarkable capability in event identification. In its first and second analysis results, NOvA has used only events with an interaction vertex and all secondary particles fully contained in the detectors. I will present studies of the potential sensitivity improvement of the $\sin^{2}{2\theta_{23}}$ and $\Delta m^{2}_{32}$ neutrino oscillation parameters from the $\nu_{\mu}$-disappearance measurement when including uncontained events in the sample. In particular, this study focuses on incorporating $\nu_{\mu}$ charged current quasi-elastic interactions of the type $\nu_{\mu} + n \to \mu + p$ where the muon is uncontained but the proton is contained. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, January 30, 2017 1:42PM - 1:54PM |
S11.00002: Low-Statistics Estimation of the PINGU Neutrino Detector's Resolutions Justin Lanfranchi PINGU is a proposed low-energy infill of the IceCube neutrino detector. We use Monte Carlo (MC) simulations of atmospheric neutrino interactions in the South Pole ice to predict the proposed detector's performance, but due to the extremely high processing time required to arrive at analysis-level events, the quantity of MC is the limitation on our ability to make such performance predictions. This is true particularly for energy and zenith-angle resolutions. To ameliorate these issues, we employ variable-bandwidth kernel density estimation (VBW-KDE) to arrive at statistically-robust detector resolutions. Here we discuss the technique and present our predictions for one proposed PINGU detector geometry. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, January 30, 2017 1:54PM - 2:06PM |
S11.00003: $\pi^{0}$ mass reconstruction in NOvA Far Detector. Sijith Edayath NOvA is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment with functionally identical, segmented, tracking calorimeter Near and Far detectors. The detectors lie 14.6 mrad off-axis from the Fermilab NuMI beam, with a well-defined peak in neutrino energy at 2 GeV. The absolute calibration of the energy scale of the detectors is a major systematic uncertainty in long-baseline oscillation search in NOvA. Neutrino detectors make use of some standard candles for absolute energy calibration. Stopping muon energy distributions, Michel electron energy distributions, and invariant $\pi^{0}$ mass are among them. In this talk, we cover NOvA$^{'}$s use of a new method to identify $\pi^{0}$ with cosmic origins in the NOvA Far Detector. We employ a computer vision based particle identifier using convolutional neural networks (CVN) to identify $\pi^{0}$s, complementing an existing strategy to identify $\pi^{0}$ from the neutrino beam using more traditional methods in the Near Detector. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, January 30, 2017 2:06PM - 2:18PM |
S11.00004: Alignment of the NOvA Detectors Sebastian Bending NOvA is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment intended to probe the neutrino mass hierarchy and provide constraints on CP violation in the neutrino sector. The experiment consists of a Near Detector at Fermilab and a Far Detector 810\,km away at Ash River, Minnesota, both of which receive neutrinos from the NuMI beamline. The misalignment of elements within the detectors contributes to systematic uncertainties in NOvA measurements. A procedure to determine and correct for detector misalignments through the use of cosmic ray muon tracks will be presented. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, January 30, 2017 2:18PM - 2:30PM |
S11.00005: Physics Impact of Improvements to the Beam Timing Resolution at MicroBooNE Tia Miceli The MicroBooNE detector is a liquid argon time-projection chamber (89 tons active mass) at Fermilab designed to measure interactions of neutrinos from the Booster Neutrino Beamline (BNB) and the Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) beamline. During the first year of data-taking, the arrival time of the neutrinos was only understood with an accuracy of 100 ns for the BNB, and was unverified for NuMI. A set of upgrades has been implemented that will reduce the uncertainty in beam delivery time by two orders of magnitude, significantly improving our ability to observe neutral-current elastic interactions in the BNB, and kaon decays at rest using NuMI. This talk explains the improvements in neutrino arrival timing, their impact on these two analyses, and the overall benefit to all other MicroBooNE measurements. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, January 30, 2017 2:30PM - 2:42PM |
S11.00006: Electron lifetime measurement using cosmic ray muons at the MicroBooNE LArTPC Varuna Crishan Meddage MicroBooNE, a 170 ton liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) located on the Fermilab’s Booster Neutrino Beamline (BNB), is designed to both probe neutrino physics phenomena and further develop the LArTPC detector technology. MicroBooNE is the largest currently operating LArTPC detector and began collecting data in Fall 2015. LArTPCs are imaging detectors that offer exceptional capabilities for studying neutrinos. A fundamental requirement for the performance of such detectors is to maintain electronegative contaminants such as oxygen and water at extremely low concentrations, which otherwise can absorb the ionization electrons. The impurity levels in liquid argon can be estimated from the drift electron lifetime as they are inversely proportional to each other. This talk presents a measurement of the drift electron lifetime using cosmic ray muon data collected by MicroBooNE. An interpretation of the observed drift electron lifetime as a function of time indicates that the electron attenuation due to impurities in the liquid argon is negligible during normal operations, implying that the argon purification and gas recirculation system in MicroBooNE is performing successfully. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, January 30, 2017 2:42PM - 2:54PM |
S11.00007: Systematics Treatment in oscillation analyses in IceCube-DeepCore Elim Cheung Located deep under the ice at the South Pole, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a 1 cubic kilometer telescope, searching for neutrinos from various sources. With DeepCore, a denser infill array inside IceCube, atmospheric neutrinos down to 10 GeV can be detected, allowing neutrino oscillation studies. In those analyses, many systematics need to be taken into account, including uncertainties from neutrino cross sections in the ice, detector calibration, and atmospheric neutrino fluxes. In this talk, I will present how systematics are treated in IceCube neutrino oscillation analyses in general. In particular, I will focus on the neutrino flux uncertainties. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, January 30, 2017 2:54PM - 3:06PM |
S11.00008: Sterile Neutrino Search with Starting Events in IceCube Kevin Ghorbani, Francis Halzen IceCube is a cubic kilometer neutrino detector at the South Pole which is sensitive to sterile neutrinos with masses and mixing angles at and around the range of LSND/MiniBooNE anomaly. In this analysis, we measure the up-going atmospheric neutrinos with energies from approximately $100GeV$ to $20TeV$ as a function of zenith angle which reflects the distance that the neutrinos traveled through the Earth. In the case of $3+1$ sterile neutrino model, we anticipate a strong matter resonance resulting into the disappearance of muon anti-neutrinos and a weak disappearance of muon neutrinos, due to MSW-resonant oscillation. In this analysis we specialize to contained neutrino events with secondary muons that start in the detector to obtain a superior measurement of energy compared to previous analyses. I will present the event selection process and sensitivity to sterile neutrinos with IceCube starting events. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, January 30, 2017 3:06PM - 3:18PM |
S11.00009: Software-based cosmic ray mitigation for neutrino event reconstruction in MicroBooNE Christopher Barnes MicroBooNE is a Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) currently taking data in the Booster Neutrino Beamline at Fermilab. The TPC wires and a set of PhotoMultiplier Tubes (PMTs) provide a three dimensional picture of each neutrino event. Through-going cosmic ray muons represent a significant background for identifying and reconstructing neutrino events. The two wire coordinate positions of each muon can be reconstructed from wire plane information, but the time at which the muon passes through the TPC (T0) is more challenging to determine. In this study, I reconstruct the T0 of detector-crossing cosmic ray muons from the particle's position at its closest approach to the anode or cathode using TPC-only information. To ensure that the T0 determination is accurate, I compare it to the flash of light closest in time according to the PMTs. This method can be incorporated into the MicroBooNE reconstruction software to efficiently and accurately identify cosmic ray muons. This talk will present the status and applicability of this algorithm for studying neutrino events in MicroBooNE. [Preview Abstract] |
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