Doctoral Dissertations

Orcid ID

0000-0002-2881-6525

Date of Award

8-2021

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Physics

Major Professor

Sowjanya Gollapinni

Committee Members

Stefan M Spanier, Nadia Fomin, David C Donovan

Abstract

The premise of this dissertation is the study of and reduction of systematic uncertainties in the MicroBooNE experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. MicroBooNE is a short-baseline oscillation experiment using the innovative liquid argon time projection chamber technology to study, with unprecedented detail, neutrino interactions. The primary goal of MicroBooNE is the investigation of the MiniBooNE low energy excess (LEE) of electron neutrino events, a result which raised fundamental questions on the existence of sterile neutrinos with broad implications to the field of particle physics. The principal study of this dissertation is a study of systematics as part of the LEE search seeking an explanation to the MiniBooNE low energy excess anomaly via neutrino-induced single photon events. A detailed knowledge of uncertainties is necessary to achieve the required precision, and the work presented in this thesis allowed for an estimated three times reduction of systematic uncertainties in the single photon analysis. In addition, a study of beamline properties and systematics on the source beam for MicroBooNE, the Booster Neutrino Beam, with a method of recovering data deemed unfit due to beamline related issues has been performed. Significance of beam-related measurements depends on the protons on target collected and, as such, this result could potentially increase the neutrino data received by MicroBooNE. Overall, these studies have significantly contributed to the precision and confidence of the single photon analysis along with potential for improvements to future analyses in MicroBooNE.

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