A measurement of hadron production cross sections for the simulation of accelerator neutrino beams and a search for muon-neutrino to electron-neutrino oscillations in the Δm² about equals 1-eV² region

Abstract

First, charged pion and proton production is measured at the HARP experiment for two experimental configurations relevant to two contemporary accelerator-based neutrino beams. Double-differential cross-sections for π + , π − and proton production are presented for proton+beryllium collisions at 8.9 GeV/c and proton+aluminum collisions at 12.9 GeV/c. These data have been used in the predictions of neutrino fluxes by the K2K experiment in Japan and the MiniBooNE and SciBooNE experiments at Fermilab.Second, a search for evidence of muon neutrino to electron neutrino oscillations at MiniBooNE is presented. MiniBooNE was designed to search for evidence of ν µ → ν e oscillations consistent with a mass-squared splitting near 1 eV 2 . Evidence of such an oscillation was reported by the LSND collaboration in the 1990s but has not been confirmed by other experiments. A method which combines the electron neutrino candidate sample with the high statistics muon neutrino candidate sample to define a single χ 2 statistic is developed. A complete description of experimental uncertainties is contained within a correlated error matrix which includes correlations between the two samples. This correlation reduces the uncertainty on the prediction of the smaller statistics electron sample and improves MiniBooNE's sensitivity to oscillations. Analysis of the MiniBooNE electron candidate data reveals no evidence of direct ν µ → ν e oscillations consistent with this interpretation of the LSND data.

A Measurement of the muon neutrino charged current quasielastic interaction and a test of Lorentz violation with the MiniBooNE experiment

“…In MiniBooNE, a systematic error for a given uncertainty is calculated with either a unisim or a multisim method [112][113][114]. For the unisim method, a new set of MC events "M C unisim " for particular systematic is created by changing a particular parameter to a 1−σ excursion value, and an error matrix may be constructed by combining with the central value MC data set, "M C cv ", …”

“…An overview of the MiniBooNE experiment is available elsewhere [19,106,[110][111][112][113][114][115].…”

“…And, the ν µ are mainly produced via the π + decay (96.7% of the 93.5%). Therefore, the uncertainty in the π + production model creates the largest systematic error in the neutrino beam predictions [106,112]. For the ν e appearance search, ν e intrinsic to the neutrino beam, are the largest background.…”

“…To calculate the meson production rate for MiniBooNE, high quality external data is required. For this we have used (in addition to other data) the results from the hadron production (HARP) experiment [112,120] at the European organization for nuclear research (CERN).…”

A search for muon neutrino and antineutrino disappearance in the Booster Neutrino Beam

“…More information on HARP can be found under Ref. [48,47]. Additionally, the E910 experiment measured the differential pion production at multiple beam energies (6.4, 12.3 GeV/c).…”