Neutron measurements from anti-neutrino hydrocarbon reactions
Abstract
Charged-current anti-neutrino interactions on hydrocarbon scintillator in the MINERvA detector are used to study activity from their final-state neutrons. To ensure that most of the neutrons are from the primary interaction, rather than hadronic reinteractions in the detector, the sample is limited to momentum transfers below 0.8 GeV/c. From 16,129 interactions, 15,246 neutral particle candidates are observed. The reference simulation predicts 64\% of these candidates are due to neutrons from the anti-neutrino interaction directly, but also overpredicts the number of candidates by 15\% overall, which is beyond the standard uncertainty estimates for models of neutrino interactions and neutron propagation in the detector. Using the measured distributions for energy deposition, time of flight, position, and speed, we explore the sensitivity to the details those two aspects of the models. We also use multiplicity distributions to evaluate the presence of a two-nucleon knockout process. These results provide critical new information toward a complete description of the hadronic final state of neutrino interactions, which is vital to neutrino oscillation experiments.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1901.04892,
title = {Neutron measurements from anti-neutrino hydrocarbon reactions},
author = {M. Elkins and T. Cai and J. Chaves and J. Kleykamp and F. Akbar and L. Albin and L. Aliaga and D. A. Andrade and M. V. Ascencio and A. Bashyal and L. Bellantoni and A. Bercellie and M. Betancourt and A. Bodek and A. Bravar and H. Budd and G. Caceres and T. Cai and M. F. Carneiro and J. Chaves and D. Coplowe and H. da Motta and S. A. Dytman and G. A. Díaz and J. Felix and L. Fields and A. Filkins and R. Fine and N. Fiza and A. M. Gago and R. Galindo and A. Ghosh and R. Gran and J. Y. Han and D. A. Harris and S. Henry and S. Jena and D. Jena and J. Kleykamp and M. Kordosky and D. Last and T. Le and A. Lovlein and J. Leistico and A. G. Lopez and X. -G. Lu and E. Maher and S. Manly and W. A. Mann and C. M. Marshall and C. Mauger and K. S. McFarland and A. M. McGowan and B. Messerly and J. Miller and J. G. Morfín and J. Mousseau and D. Naples and J. K. Nelson and C. Nguyen and A. Norrick and Nuruzzaman and A. Olivier and V. Paolone and G. N. Perdue and M. A. Ramírez and R. D. Ransome and H. Ray and D. Rimal and D. Ruterbories and H. Schellman and C. J. Solano Salinas and H. Su and V. S. Syrotenko and E. Valencia and J. Wolcott and C. Wret and B. Yaeggy},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.04892},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
22 pages, 11 figures, synchronized to incorporate journal reviewer's comments