Speaker
Description
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a next-generation long-baseline oscillation experiment, aiming to address fundamental questions about neutrino oscillations, CP violation, and the origin of matter–antimatter asymmetry. At CERN, the ProtoDUNE detectors play a crucial role in preparing for the DUNE far detector construction and operation through extensive testing of detector technologies, data acquisition, and reconstruction strategies. The presented work focuses on multiple aspects of this preparatory program, from the data acquisition to high-level physics analysis.
Half of this poster reports the first observation of neutrino-interaction candidates within ProtoDUNE. Independently of ProtoDUNE operations, the 400 GeV/c SPS proton beam at CERN is impinged on a target 700m upstream from ProtoDUNE, creating a source of neutrinos and, potentially, beyond-standard-model particles. The poster reports efforts to identify activity in ProtoDUNE consistent with the interaction of SPS-induced neutrinos. This has required the development and validation of new trigger strategies, pushing the limits of the DAQ capabilities with higher trigger rates. A full selection pipeline is implemented to remove 99.98% of the background cosmic-muon interactions while maintaining an efficiency of 14.2% on the neutrino signal. The excess of selected beam-related interactions compatible with neutrinos has been measured to be 1.4 events per hour, giving a significance of 6 sigma over the background. This analysis provides a crucial proof of concept for both hardware reliability and reconstruction algorithms for future ProtoDUNE rare event searches, whilst serving as a novel benchmark for validating event simulation and improving reconstruction performance.
The second half of the poster reports steps towards a novel pion–argon scattering measurement with ProtoDUNE. This analysis aims to characterize the relationship between the visible energy deposited after the pion interaction and the primary pion energy across multiple interaction channels. By quantifying the missing energy related to the invisible neutrons and nuclear effects, these measurements provide key information into the energy reconstruction biases and the underlying nuclear models. Such constraints are vital for reducing the systematic uncertainties on the nuclear models used for neutrino interactions, which directly affect the precision of oscillation parameter measurements in DUNE.
Overall, this work integrates the first observation of neutrino candidates in a DUNE far-detector prototype, and pion–argon interaction studies for tackling the systematic uncertainties for the future measurements, contributing to the robust preparation of DUNE’s physics program.