Cosmic Ray Background Rejection with Wire-Cell LArTPC Event Reconstruction in the MicroBooNE Detector

• Published in: Physical review applied 2021-06, Vol.15 (6), Article 064071
• Main Authors: Abratenko, P., Alrashed, M., An, R., Anthony, J., Asaadi, J., Ashkenazi, A., Balasubramanian, S., Baller, B., Barnes, C., Barr, G., Basque, V., Bathe-Peters, L., Benevides Rodrigues, O., Berkman, S., Bhanderi, A., Bhat, A., Bishai, M., Blake, A., Bolton, T., Camilleri, L., Caratelli, D., Caro Terrazas, I., Castillo Fernandez, R., Cavanna, F., Cerati, G., Chen, Y., Church, E., Cianci, D., Conrad, J.M., Convery, M., Cooper-Troendle, L., Crespo-Anadón, J.I., Del Tutto, M., Devitt, A., Diurba, R., Domine, L., Dorrill, R., Duffy, K., Dytman, S., Eberly, B., Ereditato, A., Escudero Sanchez, L., Evans, J.J., Fiorentini Aguirre, G.A., Fitzpatrick, R.S., Fleming, B.T., Foppiani, N., Franco, D., Furmanski, A.P., Garcia-Gamez, D., Gardiner, S., Ge, G., Gollapinni, S., Goodwin, O., Gramellini, E., Green, P., Greenlee, H., Gu, W., Guenette, R., Guzowski, P., Hagaman, L., Hall, E., Hamilton, P., Hen, O., Horton-Smith, G.A., Hourlier, A., Huang, E.-C., Itay, R., James, C., Jan de Vries, J., Ji, X., Jiang, L., Jo, J.H., Johnson, R.A., Jwa, Y.-J., Kamp, N., Kaneshige, N., Karagiorgi, G., Ketchum, W., Kirby, B., Kirby, M., Kobilarcik, T., Kreslo, I., LaZur, R., Lepetic, I., Li, K., Li, Y., Littlejohn, B.R., Lorca, D., Louis, W.C., Luo, X., Marchionni, A., Mariani, C., Marsden, D., Marshall, J., Martin-Albo, J., Martinez Caicedo, D.A., Mason, K., Mastbaum, A., McConkey, N.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Calorimeters; Cosmic ray & astroparticle detectors; Electroweak interaction; INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY; Metrology; Neutrino detectors; Optoelectronics; PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS; Scintillators; Tomography
• ISSN: 2331-7019; 2331-7019
• DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevApplied.15.064071

For a large liquid-argon time-projection chamber (LArTPC) operating on or near the Earth’s surface to detect neutrino interactions, the rejection of cosmogenic background is a critical and challenging task because of the large cosmic-ray flux and the long drift time of the time-projection chamber. We introduce a superior cosmic background rejection procedure based on the Wire-Cell three-dimensional (3D) event reconstruction for LArTPCs. From an initial 1:20 000 neutrino to cosmic-ray background ratio, we demonstrate these tools on data from the MicroBooNE experiment and create a high-performance generic neutrino event selection with a cosmic contamination of 14.9% (9.7%) for a visible energy region greater than O(200) MeV. The neutrino interaction selection efficiency is 80.4% and 87.6% for inclusive νμ charged-current and νe charged-current interactions, respectively. Here, this significantly improved performance compared with existing reconstruction algorithms marks a major milestone toward reaching the scientific goals of LArTPC neutrino oscillation experiments operating near the Earth’s surface.