Speaker: Steve Doran (ISU)

Host: Jake Simon

Title: Measuring the neutrino-Oxygen neutral current quasi-elastic cross section using the Accelerator Neutrino Neutron Interaction Experiment

Abstract:

Though the scales of particle physics and astrophysics could not be further apart, their joint scientific efforts have led to groundbreaking discoveries surrounding the most abundant matter particle in the universe, the neutrino. One such discovery that awaits detection is the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background (DSNB), with an expected event rate of only a few per year in the world’s largest water Cherenkov detector, Super Kamiokande. One of the key difficulties in searching for very rare processes is quantifying backgrounds that are indistinguishable from signal. Neutral current quasi-elastic (NCQE) interactions between atmospheric neutrinos and protons in the detector mimic the response expected from DSNB-induced inverse beta decay. Present uncertainties on these interactions induces a large error on atmospheric neutrino backgrounds, which in turn limits the sensitivity at low energies where the DSNB flux is predicted to be large [1]. In this talk, I detail the progress in performing a high statistics NCQE cross section measurement using the Accelerator Neutrino Neutron Interaction Experiment (ANNIE) and accelerator neutrinos from FermiLab’s Booster Neutrino Beam. As these neutrinos are of similar energy to atmospherics and the baseline of ANNIE is extremely short (100 m), this measurement will aid in reducing the uncertainty of this irreducible background to DSNB searches and help to constrain other backgrounds for long baseline neutrino experiments and proton decay searches.