First Measurement of Energy-dependent Inclusive Muon Neutrino Charged-Current Cross Sections on Argon with the MicroBooNE Detector

The MicroBooNE collaboration Abratenko, P. ; An, R. ; Anthony, J. ; et al.
Phys.Rev.Lett. 128 (2022) 151801, 2022.
Inspire Record 1954078 DOI 10.17182/hepdata.114863

We report a measurement of the energy-dependent total charged-current cross section $\sigma\left(E_\nu\right)$ for inclusive muon neutrinos scattering on argon, as well as measurements of flux-averaged differential cross sections as a function of muon energy and hadronic energy transfer ($\nu$). Data corresponding to 5.3$\times$10$^{19}$ protons on target of exposure were collected using the MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber located in the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Beam with a mean neutrino energy of approximately 0.8~GeV. The mapping between the true neutrino energy $E_\nu$ and reconstructed neutrino energy $E^{rec}_\nu$ and between the energy transfer $\nu$ and reconstructed hadronic energy $E^{rec}_{had}$ are validated by comparing the data and Monte Carlo (MC) predictions. In particular, the modeling of the missing hadronic energy and its associated uncertainties are verified by a new method that compares the $E^{rec}_{had}$ distributions between data and an MC prediction after constraining the reconstructed muon kinematic distributions, energy and polar angle, to those of data. The success of this validation gives confidence that the missing energy in the MicroBooNE detector is well-modeled and underpins first-time measurements of both the total cross section $\sigma\left(E_\nu\right)$ and the differential cross section $d\sigma/d\nu$ on argon.

9 data tables

$\nu_\mu$CC inclusive total cross section per nucleon in each neutrino energy bin with statistical plus systematic uncertainty. The total uncertainty comes from the square root of the covariance matrix diagonal entries.

$\nu_\mu$CC inclusive differential cross section per nucleon in each muon energy bin with statistical plus systematic uncertainty. The total uncertainty comes from the square root of the covariance matrix diagonal entries.

$\nu_\mu$CC inclusive differential cross section per nucleon in each hadronic energy transfer bin with statistical plus systematic uncertainty. The total uncertainty comes from the square root of the covariance matrix diagonal entries.

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