Analyzing Neutrino Events in Monte Carlo Simulations
By:
Alexander Yeagle, Cornell College
Advisors:
Dr. Tim Bolton, Dr. Glenn Horton-Smith, Dr. David McKee
Welcome
to my webpage. The purpose of this page is to explain the research I was
a part of at Kansas State University with the High Energy Physics (HEP) group
over the summer of 2010. The research was part of the KSU Physics REU program,
funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). I worked on this project with
Cristian Gaidau of the University of Minnesota; his webpage can be found here.
For more
information, feel free to see the poster or presentation about the research.
Project Summary
The goal of this
project was to create a reliable procedure for hand-scanning events from
computer simulations of the MicroBooNE detector. We wanted to be able to
identify events caused by electron-neutrinos (
e) and
discriminate from all other events. To
achieve this goal, we first looked at simulations of single particles and
identified their distinctive characteristics. We then learned the physics
behind the different scattering modes of more complicated multi-particle
events. This information was then used to practice hand-scanning and become
reliable scanners. Armed with knowledge of the physics and much practice, we
then designed an algorithmic procedure to identify useful e events
and reject the background events. Once this procedure was completed and
refined, it was subjected to an efficiency test of 100 random events of all
types to determine how well it worked. The results and conclusions of our
summer’s work were presented at a MicroBooNE collaboration meeting at Fermilab.