Speaker
Description
This work aims to further investigate MicroBooNE's inclusive single-photon search results, which reported a more than 2$\sigma$ excess below 600 MeV in shower energy for events with no reconstructed protons. Taken together with MiniBooNE's long-standing low-energy excess and MicroBooNE's recent single-electron search results showing no observable excess with respect to Standard Model predictions, this result provides strong impetus for expanded exploration of the single-photon channel in Fermilab's short-baseline LArTPC experiments. By identifying and classifying isolated MeV-scale energy depositions, or blips, in the vicinity of single-photon events selected by the WireCell reconstruction framework, we establish a more comprehensive labeling scheme for nearby hadronic content. In particular, blips found upstream of the shower's primary axis indicate the presence of previously-unidentified final-state protons, while elevated blip counts at wide angles signal the presence of final-state neutrons. By applying this new technique to its full dataset, MicroBooNE will perform a purer and higher-statistics test of the truly isolated nature of its modest photon-like excess, furthering its hunt for the presence of unexpected new physics beyond the Standard Model. This poster will provide an update on the status of this enhanced single-photon analysis from MicroBooNE, which will form a major piece of the collaboration's final generation of future low-energy-excess-oriented MicroBooNE results.