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Scientists measured how elusive particles interact with argon and found discrepancies with theory.
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Neutrinos are tiny particles that zip through Earth, barely noticing it. In the MicroBooNE experiment, they are caught in a tank of liquid argon. When a neutrino strikes an argon nucleus, it produces an electron and protons, like splashes from a stone thrown into water.
Scientists measured where these particles fly and with what energy. It turned out that models predict the electron's behavior well but miss the angles at which protons emerge. It's like a weather forecast that accurately predicts rain but not the wind direction.
The experiment used a neutrino beam from the Fermilab accelerator. Over the entire run, they accumulated 1.3×$10^{21}$ protons on target: that's a number with 21 zeros!
Such measurements will help tune models for future giant detectors, such as DUNE, which will search for differences between neutrinos and antineutrinos. Perhaps these differences hold the secret to why the Universe is made of matter rather than antimatter.
We present a new measurement of the electron neutrino charged current cross section on argon without pions in the final state. This measurement uses the full MicroBooNE Booster Neutrino Beam dataset of $$1.3\times 10^{21}$$ protons on target collected at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Events are considered both with and without protons above the kinetic energy visibility threshold. Differential cross sections are extracted in proton and electron kinematics, including energy and angle relative to the neutrino beam direction. The relationship between the hadronic and leptonic systems is explored through the angle between the proton and electron directions. The resulting cross sections are compared to a variety of available generator predictions using different models of neutrino interactions. We find good agreement with most models in lepton kinematics and some discrepancies in the hadronic system modeling, particularly in proton angle.
