First Measurement of Monoenergetic Muon Neutrino Charged Current Interactions
2018
We report the first measurement of monoenergetic
muon neutrino
charged currentinteractions.
MiniBooNEhas isolated 236 MeV
muon neutrinoevents originating from charged kaon decay at rest ($K^+ \rightarrow \mu^+ \nu_\mu$) at the
NuMI
beamlineabsorber. These signal $\nu_\mu$-carbon events are distinguished from primarily pion decay in flight $\nu_\mu$ and $\
overline{\nu}_\mu$ backgrounds produced at the target station and decay pipe using their arrival time and reconstructed
muonenergy. The significance of the signal observation is at the 3.9$\sigma$ level. The
muonkinetic energy, neutrino-nucleus energy transfer ($\omega=E_\nu-E_\mu$), and total cross section for these events is extracted. This result is the first known-energy,
weak-interaction-only probe of the nucleus to yield a measurement of $\omega$ using neutrinos, a quantity thus far only accessible through
electron scattering.
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