Search for an anomalous excess of inclusive charged-current νe interactions in the MicroBooNE experiment using Wire-Cell reconstruction

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Abstract

We report a search for an anomalous excess of inclusive charged-current (CC) e interactions using the Wire-Cell event reconstruction package in the MicroBooNE experiment, which is motivated by the previous observation of a low-energy excess (LEE) of electromagnetic events from the MiniBooNE experiment. With a single liquid argon time projection chamber detector, the measurements of CC interactions as well as 0 interactions are used to constrain signal and background predictions of e CC interactions. A data set collected from February 2016 to July 2018 corresponding to an exposure of 6.369 10 20 protons on target from the Booster Neutrino Beam at FNAL is analyzed. With x representing an overall normalization factor and referred to as the LEE strength parameter, we select 56 fully contained e CC candidates while expecting 69.6 AE 8.0 (stat.) AE5.0 (sys.) and 103.8 AE 9.0 (stat.) AE7.4 (sys.) candidates after constraints for the absence (eLEE x0 ) of the median signal strength derived from the MiniBooNE observation and the presence (eLEE x1 ) of that signal strength, respectively. Under a nested hypothesis test using both rate and shape information in all available channels, the best-fit x is determined to be 0 (eLEE x0 ) with a 95.5% confidence level upper limit of x at 0.502. Under a simple-vs-simple hypotheses test, the eLEE x1 hypothesis is rejected at 3.75, while the eLEE x0 hypothesis is shown to be consistent with the observation at 0.45. In the context of the eLEE model, the estimated 68.3% confidence interval of the e CC hypothesis to explain the LEE observed in the MiniBooNE experiment is disfavored at a significance level of more than 2.6 (3.0) considering MiniBooNE's full (statistical) uncertainties.

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