Abstract
For a large liquid-argon time-projection chamber (LArTPC) operating on or near the Earth's surface to detect neutrino interactions, the rejection of cosmogenic background is a critical and challenging task because of the large cosmic-ray flux and the long drift time of the time-projection chamber. We introduce a superior cosmic background rejection procedure based on the Wire-Cell three-dimensional (3D) event reconstruction for LArTPCs. From an initial 1:20 000 neutrino to cosmic-ray background ratio, we demonstrate these tools on data from the MicroBooNE experiment and create a high-performance generic neutrino event selection with a cosmic contamination of 14.9% (9.7%) for a visible energy region greater than O(200) MeV. The neutrino interaction selection efficiency is 80.4% and 87.6% for inclusive νμ charged-current and νe charged-current interactions, respectively. This significantly improved performance compared with existing reconstruction algorithms marks a major milestone toward reaching the scientific goals of LArTPC neutrino oscillation experiments operating near the Earth's surface.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 064071 |
Journal | Physical Review Applied |
Volume | 15 |
Issue number | 6 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was prepared by the MicroBooNE collaboration using the resources of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), a U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, HEP User Facility. Fermilab is managed by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC (FRA), acting under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359. MicroBooNE is supported by the following: the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Offices of High Energy Physics and Nuclear Physics; the U.S. National Science Foundation; the Swiss National Science Foundation; the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), part of the United Kingdom Research and Innovation; and The Royal Society (United Kingdom). Additional support for the laser calibration system and cosmic-ray tagger was provided by the Albert Einstein Center for Fundamental Physics, Bern, Switzerland.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 American Physical Society.