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.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 170-176).

Reproduction de : Thèse de doctorat : Physique nucléaire : Lyon 1 : 2002. / Titre provenant de l'écran titre. 151 réf. bibliogr.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 125-130).

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The production of charmed particles and a limit to tau lepton production have been measured using a hybrid emulsion spectrometer in the Fermilab wide-band neutrino beam. / The relative cross section for charged current charmed particle production is / (DIAGRAM, TABLE OR GRAPHIC OMITTED...PLEASE SEE DAI) / and the energy dependence of the cross section and the kinematic distributions of the charm events are given. One event with charm pair production was observed. A limit of (sigma)((nu)(--->)(mu)cc)/(sigma)((nu)(--->)(mu)c) < 0.06 (90%C.L.) is set to the ratio of charged current pair and single charm production. The relative rates of D(DEGREES), D('+), F('+), and (LAMDA)(,c)('+) production have been measured--the fraction of D mesons is / (DIAGRAM, TABLE OR GRAPHIC OMITTED...PLEASE SEE DAI) / Momentum, transverse momentum, Feynman X, and fragmentation (Z) distributions are presented. The mean Z for charmed hadrons is 0.59 (+OR-) 0.03((+OR-) 0.03). / No tau leptons were observed, and an upper limit to the (nu)(,(mu))-(tau) coupling of 0.0063 (90%C.L.) is set. For (nu)(,(mu))-(nu)(,(tau)) oscillations this implies / (DIAGRAM, TABLE OR GRAPHIC OMITTED...PLEASE SEE DAI) / for maximum mixing.

MINOS is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment. A neutrino beam is created at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois and fired down through the Earth. Measurements of the energy spectra and composition of the neutrino beam are made both at the source using the Near detector and 735 km away at the Soudan Underground Laboratory in Minnesota using the Far detector. By comparing the spectrum and flavour composition of the neutrino beam between the two detectors neutrino oscillations can be observed. Such a comparison depends on the accuracy of the relative calorimetric energy scale. This thesis details a precise measurement of the calorimetric energy scale of the MINOS Far detector and Calibration detector using stopping muons with a new "track window" technique. These measurements are used to perform the relative calibration between the two detectors. This calibration has been accomplished to 1.7% in data and to significantly better than 2% in the Monte Carlo simulation, thus achieving the MINOS relative calibration target of 2%. A number of cross-checks have been performed to ensure the robustness of the calorimetric energy scale measurements. At the Calibration detector the test-beam energy between run periods is found to be consistent with the detector response to better than 2% after the relative calibration is applied. The muon energy loss in the MINOS detectors determined from Bethe-Bloch predictions, data and Monte Carlo are compared and understood. To estimate the systematic error on the measurement of the neutrino oscillation parameters caused by a relative miscalibration a study is performed. A 2% relative miscalibration is shown to cause a 0.6% bias in the values of Δm² and sin²(2θ).

In this thesis we investigate the scattering of neutrinos and antineutrinos off free protons in the deep inelastic region via the neutral weak current. In the BEBC experiment, a hybrid detector consisting of a large liquid hydrogen bubble chamber and electronic counters for muon and hadron identification, has been exposed to the CERN wide band beam of neutrinos with energies up to 300 GeV. The detector provides the possibility to discriminate efficiently between hadron-induced and neutrino-induced muonless events. We are interested in the structure of the proton as it is resolved by the neutral carrier Zº of the electroweak force. The kinematical scaling variable X_(BJ) that represents information about the proton structure cannot be reconstructed in an experiment using a hydrogen target. Thus the X_(BJ) dependence of the cross section for free protons has so far not been accessible. We construct a method that links the measurable distribution in a new variable w₁ that incorporates the hadronic momentum longitudinal and transverse to the beam, to the one in X_(BJ), in a model-independent way. It is shown that even with the statistics of about a thousand events it is possible to recover the X_(BJ) dependence fo the neutrino proton cross-section with appreciable precision. This method is then applied to the data that consists of 2200 neutrino and 1060 antineutrino neutral current events, after correcting for various backgrounds and cuts. We observe a neutral current proton structure that is consistent with the notion of parton universality. The results are compared to two other investigations which employ isoscalar heavy targets, and we find agreement in as far as they are comparable. Furthermore we study the connection between the neutral current structure functions and distributions in the hadronic scaling variable w. It is found that they are related by simple formulae which do not incorporate any dependence on further kinematical variables, in the scaling approximation. We advocate the use of the w dependence of the neutral current cross section as an important piece of information that can provide access to some quantities that are measured only indirectly in charged current and electromagnetic scattering, and to the behaviour of the structure functions at small values of their argument.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references.