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Measurement of the neutrino charged current coherent pion production cross section on carbon and oxygen with the T2K near detector

The goal of this thesis is to measure the coherent + production cross section on carbon and oxygen nuclei, induced by muon neutrinos from the T2K beamline. This is performed using the tracker system of the off-axis near detector which consists of three argon gas Time Projection Chambers between which two Fine-Grained Detectors (FGD) are located. While the first FGD is made of plastic scintillator, the second one has alternate layers of scintillator and water which allows a measurement on oxygen target. The measurement on carbon target is reported as a function of the muon and pion momentum and angle, the sum of the pion and muon energies and the coplanarity angle between the muon and the pion. The statistics for the oxygen measurement remains too low and therefore an upper limit is set on both the differential cross sections and total flux-integrated cross section. The phase space considered is 0.2 < pμ− < 5 GeV/c , cos μ− > 0.7, 0.15 < p + < 1.5 GeV/c , cos + > 0.45, 0.5 < E + + Eμ− < 6.5 GeV, +μ− > 90 . The values found for the flux-integrated cross section in the reduced phase-space are: < C >= 3.23 ± 0.67(stat.) ± 0.82(syst.) × 10−40cm2 per carbon nucleus O 9.57 × 10−40cm2 per oxygen nucleus, with 95% probability It was found that the 95% upper limit on oxygen is always smaller than the Rein-Sehgal predictions, making this model unreliable for low neutrino energies. On the other hand, the limit remains compatible with the Berger-Sehgal model in every differential variables. The data for carbon target agree, within the systematic errors, with the Berger-Sehgal model except for pion momentum below 0.35 GeV/c and coplanarity angle below 155 degrees. In the latter cases an excess is observed in the data.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:766202
Date January 2018
CreatorsMartins, Paul
PublisherQueen Mary, University of London
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/43994

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