Muon-neutrino charged-current cross sections from MicroBooNE: a detailed investigation of final states with and without protons

• Benjamin Bogart

A detailed understanding of muon neutrino charged-current interactions on argon is crucial to the study of neutrino oscillations in current and future experiments using liquid argon time projection chambers. To help fill this need, MicroBooNE has produced a comprehensive set of cross section measurements which simultaneously probe the leptonic and hadronic systems by dividing the inclusive channel into final states with and without protons above a 35 MeV kinetic energy threshold. These are the first differential muon neutrino-argon cross section measurements made simultaneously for final states with and without protons, and thus they provide novel information that will help stimulate the improvement of event generator modeling. In particular, these results reveal that widely used event generators mismodel final states without visible protons. This is possibly due to insufficient modeling of final state interactions and a better incorporation of nuclear-medium effects into the simulation of final-state interactions improves the theoretical description of this data.