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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/D87D3260 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Kaleko, David |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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