Description
Neutrinos can be used to study fundamental aspects of the universe and give us insight into many big questions in physics. One of the most interesting properties of neutrinos is that the description of neutrinos that interact (flavor states) is different from the description of neutrinos that traverse time and space (mass states). Most neutrino experiments work to understand some aspect of the relationship between these two descriptions. In order to study these properties, we need to understand the flux, or how many neutrinos go through our detectors, and how those neutrinos interact with our detectors through their interaction rates.
ICARUS is a 430 t liquid argon neutrino detector located at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and serves as the far detector for the Short Baseline Neutrino program. The ICARUS detector lies 795 m downstream and 5.7° above the Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) neutrino beam. At this large off-axis angle, ICARUS provides a unique opportunity to measure a variety of electron and muon (anti-)neutrino interaction cross sections on argon nuclei. These measurements will be an important input to the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. As a first step toward that end, we performed a study to characterize the NuMI neutrino flux expected at ICARUS and to provide an estimate of the systematic uncertainties for use in cross section measurements.
| Collaboration | ICARUS |
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