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Published January 1, 2017 | Version v1
Journal article Open

Michel electron reconstruction using cosmic-ray data from the MicroBooNE LArTPC

Creators

  • 1. Fermilab Natl Accelerator Lab, POB 500, Batavia, IL 60510 USA
  • 2. Yale Univ, New Haven, CT 06520 USA
  • 3. IIT, Chicago, IL 60616 USA
  • 4. Univ Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 0HE, England
  • 5. Univ Texas Arlington, Arlington, TX 76019 USA
  • 6. Univ Bern, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland
  • 7. Univ Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
  • 8. Univ Oxford, Oxford OX1 3RH, England
  • 9. TUBITAK Space Technol Res Inst, METU Campus, TR-06800 Ankara, Turkey
  • 10. Brookhaven Natl Lab, Upton, NY 11973 USA
  • 11. Univ Lancaster, Lancaster LA1 4YW, England
  • 12. Kansas State Univ, Manhattan, KS 66506 USA
  • 13. MIT, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
  • 14. Columbia Univ, New York, NY 10027 USA

Description

The MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) has been taking data at Fermilab since 2015 collecting, in addition to neutrino beam, cosmic-ray muons. Results are presented on the reconstruction of Michel electrons produced by the decay at rest of cosmicray muons. Michel electrons are abundantly produced in the TPC, and given their well known energy spectrum can be used to study MicroBooNE's detector response to low-energy electrons (electrons with energies up to similar to 50 MeV). We describe the fully-automated algorithm developed to reconstruct Michel electrons, with which a sample of similar to 14,000 Michel electron candidates is obtained. Most of this article is dedicated to studying the impact of radiative photons produced by Michel electrons on the accuracy and resolution of their energy measurement. In this energy range, ionization and bremsstrahlung photon production contribute similarly to electron energy loss in argon, leading to a complex electron topology in the TPC. By profiling the performance of the reconstruction algorithm on simulation we show that the ability to identify and include energy deposited by radiative photons leads to a significant improvement in the energy measurement of low-energy electrons. The fractional energy resolution we measure improves from over 30% to similar to 20% when we attempt to include radiative photons in the reconstruction. These studies are relevant to a large number of analyses which aim to study neutrinos by measuring electrons produced by nu(e) interactions over a broad energy range.

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