A Measurement of Neutrino Charged Current Interactions and a Search for Muon Neutrino Disappearance with the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Beam

Abstract

In this thesis, we report on a measurement of muon neutrino inclusive charged current interactions on carbon in the few GeV region, using the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Beam. The all neutrino mode data collected in the SciBooNE experiment is used for this analysis.We collected high-statistics CC interaction sample at SciBooNE, and extracted energy dependent inclusive charged current interaction rates and cross sections for a wide energy range from 0.25 GeV to ∼3 GeV. We measure the interaction rates with 6-15% precision, and the cross sections with 10-30% precision. We also made an energy integrated measurements, with the precisions of 3% for the rate, and 8% for the cross section measurements. This is the first measurement of the CC inclusive cross section on carbon around 1 GeV.This inclusive interaction measurement is nearly free from effects of hadron re-interactions in the nucleus. Hence, it is complementary to other exclusive cross section measurements, and essential to understand the neutrino interaction cross sections in the few GeV region, which is relevant to ongoing and future neutrino oscillation experiments. This analysis also provides the normalization for SciBooNE's previous cross section ratio measurements for charged current coherent pion production and neutral current neutral pion production. Then, a precise comparison between our previous measurements and the model predictions becomes possible.The result of the interaction rate measurement is used to constrain the product of the neutrino flux and the cross section at the other experiment on the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Beam: MiniBooNE. We conducted a search for short-baseline muon neutrino disappearance using data both from SciBooNE and MiniBooNE, to test a possible neutrino oscillation with sterile neutrinos which is suggested by the LSND experiment. With this constraint by SciBooNE, we significantly reduced the flux and the cross section uncertainties at MiniBooNE, and achieved the world best sensitivity for the ν µ disappearance at 0.5 < ∆m 2 < 30 (eV 2 ). We found no significant oscillation signal, and set one of the world strongest limits for the sterile neutrino models.ii

Measurement ofK+production cross section by 8 GeV protons using high-energy neutrino interactions in the SciBooNE detector

“…1. For the low-energy BNB, the neutrino spectrum at Sci-BooNE and MiniBooNE are very similar, except for the flux normalization difference [10], in particular, according to simulations, the mean energy of the ν µ flux is expected to be 0.76 (0.79) GeV at the SciBooNE (MiniBooNE) detector location, reflecting the very similar fraction of ν µ s from π + and K + decay at the two locations.…”

6 th National Conference on Nanotechnology and Materials Science Organized by Department of Physics, Lucknow University, Lucknow, India 11-13 February, 2017

“…Figure 4: Dependency of ∆m 221 on sin 2 θ 12 from all solar neutrino data for allowed 1σ, 2σ, 3σ regions where green represents: SK+SNO, blue represents: KamLAND, red represents for combined result. Image credit[91,92].…”