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MicroBooNE

People

Dr. John Marshall, Dr. Andy Chappell, Dr. Ryan Cross

Overview

MicroBooNE(external link) is a 170-ton Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) detector in the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) at Fermilab (Batavia, IL, USA). It took data between 2015 and 2021, making it the longest continually running LArTPC experiment to date. The data from LArTPCs can be viewed as high-resolution images, showing both the paths the charged particles from neutrino interactions take, but also the charge deposited by them. An example of this can be seen below:

Example Event Display from MicroBooNE, showing an electromagnetic shower + 5 tracks.
Public MicroBooNE Event Display. More available here(external link)

Physics Goals

MicroBooNE was built to investigate the 'low energy excess' seen at the earlier MiniBooNE experiment, where an excess of candidate electron neutrino events were seen, compared to the predicted baseline. The MiniBooNE result generated substantial interest from the theory community, but the proposed explanations were difficult to explore with the detector technology at MiniBooNE. The LArTPC however, can distinguish between the main proposed backgrounds and help untangle the confusion seen at MiniBooNE. Whilst the low energy excess is the main Physics goal of MicroBooNE, there is also an incredibly rich cross-section program, powered by the vast amounts of neutrino-argon interaction data MicroBooNE has access to, as well as the unique feature of being exposed to two distinct neutrino beams.

MicroBooNE at Warwick

The focus of the MicroBooNE group at Warwick is the development of the Pandora(external link) LArTPC event reconstruction. Pandora uses a mixture of traditional and deep-learning methods of pattern recognition to reconstruct the particle content of interactions at MicroBooNE. Pandora is one of the main reconstruction frameworks in use at MicroBooNE, and is featured in a large number of papers, as well as being the focus of an early paper(external link) that outlines how Pandora deals with both the cosmic-ray and neutrino interactions that MicroBooNE sees.

Other Links

  • MicroBooNE Open Data(external link). MicroBooNE has opened some of its data, show casing real LArTPC cosmic-ray data, alongside simulated neutrino interactions. A paper on it can be found here(external link), which includes a link to a GitHub repository for exploratory analysis of the open data using Python and Jupyter Notebooks.
  • There is also an online event display(external link), produced from researchers at Warwick, that gives an example of the 3D reconstruction capabilities of LArTPCs, using the MicroBooNE open data. The clusters, start points and full 3D reconstruction shown is powered by Pandora.

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