Improving the NOvA 3-Flavour Neutrino Oscillation Analysis
NOvA is a long-baseline neutrino experiment studying neutrino oscillations, a quantum mechanical interference phenomena where the observed neutrino flavour differs from that measured earlier, stemming from neutrino mass and flavour states mixing. NOvA consists of two functionally identical tracking calorimeter detectors deployed in the Fermilab NuMI beam. Both detectors are placed 14.6 mrad off the beam axis to achieve a narrow energy peak at 1.8 GeV at an oscillation maximum. The NOvA 3-flavour oscillation analysis measures the neutrino oscillation parameters sin2θ23 and ∆m232 as well as sets limit to δCP , the octant of θ23 and the sign of ∆m32. The event selection for 3-flavour neutrino oscillation analysis ensures the maximum quantity of signal is made available and a minimal amount of background is present. The current disappearance analysis selection has an efficiency of 80% for selecting νμ CC events, and with some improvements additional events could be recovered into the analysis to improve the sensitivity to the aforementioned oscillation parameters. In an effort to recover the currently rejected signal event to the analysis, these events were trained in a classification neural network. The aim of the network was to divide the data into signal (νμ CC events) and background (NC and νe CC events). The highest performing network gave an additional figure of merit gain of 2.34 increasing the sensitivity by 4.3% in effective POT equal to 33 days of additional data taking. This was compared to changing the current particle identification event selection cuts, the best result out of the tested cut combinations gave an additional FOM of 3.36 equal to 3.7% increase in effective POT equivalent to 28 days of data taking.
- Research Organization:
- Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC02-07CH11359
- OSTI ID:
- 2336763
- Report Number(s):
- FERMILAB-THESIS-2023-23; oai:inspirehep.net:2776286
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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