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Enhanced Reconstruction of Sub-GeV Neutrinos Charged Current Interactions in LArTPC

High Energy Physics - Experiment 2026-04-24 v1

Abstract

This paper presents a comprehensive study of the reconstruction of sub-GeV neutrino charged-current interactions within a Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC). We demonstrate that traditional charge-based calorimetry is fundamentally limited at sub-GeV scales by significant recombination fluctuations and missing hadronic energy. We show that energy reconstruction using energy deposited as scintillation light (L) partially benefits from the previously reported self-compensating light effect. At neutrino energies above 400 MeV, the light-only reconstruction still outperforms charge-only methods that can separate EM and hadronic objects. The performance of the two remains comparable below 300 MeV. Using the energy-deposit information from both detector signals, we demonstrate a 70% efficiency in separating electron neutrinos and antineutrinos. By using a proximity-based algorithm coupled with a geometric lepton-exclusion cone, we also demonstrate the ability to isolate neutron-induced energy depositions from background. This enables an improvement of sub-GeV direction reconstruction by about 20 degrees for antineutrinos. This study provides new insights into how to enhance the physics reach of future LArTPC atmospheric neutrino analyses.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.20957,
  title  = {Enhanced Reconstruction of Sub-GeV Neutrinos Charged Current Interactions in LArTPC},
  author = {Stone Chou and Sanskar Jain and Wei Shi and Ciro Riccio},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.20957},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

17 pages, 26 figures