The Supreme Court As Risk Manager: An Analysis of Skinner

Examining a recent case in which the U.S. Supreme Court approved the collection of blood and urine samples from railroad employees, the authors conclude that, in attempting to improve railroad safety, both majority and minority opinions reflected undue emphasis on technical issues and inadequate attention to the intangible social values underlying traditional Constitutional rights to privacy

Design and construction of the MicroBooNE Cosmic Ray Tagger system

The MicroBooNE detector utilizes a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) with an 85 t active mass to study neutrino interactions along the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) at Fermilab. With a deployment location near ground level, the detector records many cosmic muon tracks in each beam-related detector trigger that can be misidentified as signals of interest. To reduce these cosmogenic backgrounds, we have designed and constructed a TPC-external Cosmic Ray Tagger (CRT). This sub-system was developed by the Laboratory for High Energy Physics (LHEP), Albert Einstein center for fundamental physics, University of Bern. The system utilizes plastic scintillation modules to provide precise time and position information for TPC-traversing particles. Successful matching of TPC tracks and CRT data will allow us to reduce cosmogenic background and better characterize the light collection system and LArTPC data using cosmic muons. In this paper we describe the design and installation of the MicroBooNE CRT system and provide an overview of a series of tests done to verify the proper operation of the system and its components during installation, commissioning, and physics data-taking

Ionization Electron Signal Processing in Single Phase LArTPCs II. Data/Simulation Comparison and Performance in MicroBooNE

The single-phase liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) provides a large amount of detailed information in the form of fine-grained drifted ionization charge from particle traces. To fully utilize this information, the deposited charge must be accurately extracted from the raw digitized waveforms via a robust signal processing chain. Enabled by the ultra-low noise levels associated with cryogenic electronics in the MicroBooNE detector, the precise extraction of ionization charge from the induction wire planes in a single-phase LArTPC is qualitatively demonstrated on MicroBooNE data with event display images, and quantitatively demonstrated via waveform-level and track-level metrics. Improved performance of induction plane calorimetry is demonstrated through the agreement of extracted ionization charge measurements across different wire planes for various event topologies. In addition to the comprehensive waveform-level comparison of data and simulation, a calibration of the cryogenic electronics response is presented and solutions to various MicroBooNE-specific TPC issues are discussed. This work presents an important improvement in LArTPC signal processing, the foundation of reconstruction and therefore physics analyses in MicroBooNE.Comment: 54 pages, 36 figures; the first part of this work can be found at arXiv:1802.0870

A Deep Neural Network for Pixel-Level Electromagnetic Particle Identification in the MicroBooNE Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber

We have developed a convolutional neural network (CNN) that can make a pixel-level prediction of objects in image data recorded by a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) for the first time. We describe the network design, training techniques, and software tools developed to train this network. The goal of this work is to develop a complete deep neural network based data reconstruction chain for the MicroBooNE detector. We show the first demonstration of a network's validity on real LArTPC data using MicroBooNE collection plane images. The demonstration is performed for stopping muon and a $\nu_\mu$ charged current neutral pion data samples

Ionization Electron Signal Processing in Single Phase LArTPCs I. Algorithm Description and Quantitative Evaluation with MicroBooNE Simulation

We describe the concept and procedure of drifted-charge extraction developed in the MicroBooNE experiment, a single-phase liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC). This technique converts the raw digitized TPC waveform to the number of ionization electrons passing through a wire plane at a given time. A robust recovery of the number of ionization electrons from both induction and collection anode wire planes will augment the 3D reconstruction, and is particularly important for tomographic reconstruction algorithms. A number of building blocks of the overall procedure are described. The performance of the signal processing is quantitatively evaluated by comparing extracted charge with the true charge through a detailed TPC detector simulation taking into account position-dependent induced current inside a single wire region and across multiple wires. Some areas for further improvement of the performance of the charge extraction procedure are also discussed.Comment: 60 pages, 36 figures. The second part of this work can be found at arXiv:1804.0258

Ionization electron signal processing in single phase LArTPCs. Part I. Algorithm Description and quantitative evaluation with MicroBooNE simulation

© 2018 IOP Publishing Ltd and Sissa Medialab. We describe the concept and procedure of drifted-charge extraction developed in the MicroBooNE experiment, a single-phase liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC). This technique converts the raw digitized TPC waveform to the number of ionization electrons passing through a wire plane at a given time. A robust recovery of the number of ionization electrons from both induction and collection anode wire planes will augment the 3D reconstruction, and is particularly important for tomographic reconstruction algorithms. A number of building blocks of the overall procedure are described. The performance of the signal processing is quantitatively evaluated by comparing extracted charge with the true charge through a detailed TPC detector simulation taking into account position-dependent induced current inside a single wire region and across multiple wires. Some areas for further improvement of the performance of the charge extraction procedure are also discussed

Rejecting cosmic background for exclusive neutrino interaction studies with Liquid Argon TPCs; a case study with the MicroBooNE detector

Cosmic ray (CR) interactions can be a challenging source of background for neutrino oscillation and cross-section measurements in surface detectors. We present methods for CR rejection in measurements of charged-current quasielastic-like (CCQE-like) neutrino interactions, with a muon and a proton in the final state, measured using liquid argon time projection chambers (LArTPCs). Using a sample of cosmic data collected with the MicroBooNE detector, mixed with simulated neutrino scattering events, a set of event selection criteria is developed that produces an event sample with minimal contribution from CR background. Depending on the selection criteria used a purity between 50% and 80% can be achieved with a signal selection efficiency between 50% and 25%, with higher purity coming at the expense of lower efficiency. While using a specific dataset from the MicroBooNE detector and selection criteria values optimized for CCQE-like events, the concepts presented here are generic and can be adapted for various studies of exclusive {\nu}{\mu} interactions in LArTPCs.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures, 1 tabl

Comparison of \nu\mu-Ar multiplicity distributions observed by MicroBooNE to GENIE model predictions

We measure a large set of observables in inclusive charged current muon neutrino scattering on argon with the MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber operating at Fermilab. We evaluate three neutrino interaction models based on the widely used GENIE event generator using these observables. The measurement uses a data set consisting of neutrino interactions with a final state muon candidate fully contained within the MicroBooNE detector. These data were collected in 2016 with the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Beam, which has an average neutrino energy of 800 MeV, using an exposure corresponding to 5E19 protons-on-target. The analysis employs fully automatic event selection and charged particle track reconstruction and uses a data-driven technique to separate neutrino interactions from cosmic ray background events. We find that GENIE models consistently describe the shapes of a large number of kinematic distributions for fixed observed multiplicity.Comment: 31 pages, 39 figures, 10 table

First Measurement of νμ\nu_{\mu} Charged-Current π0\pi^{0} Production on Argon with a LArTPC

We report the first measurement of the flux-integrated cross section of $\nu_{\mu}$ charged-current single $\pi^{0}$ production on argon. This measurement is performed with the MicroBooNE detector, an 85 ton active mass liquid argon time projection chamber exposed to the Booster Neutrino Beam at Fermilab. This result on argon is compared to past measurements on lighter nuclei to investigate the scaling assumptions used in models of the production and transport of pions in neutrino-nucleus scattering. The techniques used are an important demonstration of the successful reconstruction and analysis of neutrino interactions producing electromagnetic final states using a liquid argon time projection chamber operating at the earth's surface

First measurement of quasi-elastic Λ\Lambda baryon production in muon anti-neutrino interactions in the MicroBooNE detector

We present the first measurement of the cross section of Cabibbo-suppressed $\Lambda$ baryon production, using data collected with the MicroBooNE detector when exposed to the neutrinos from the Main Injector beam at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The data analyzed correspond to $2.2 \times 10^{20}$ protons on target of neutrino mode running and $4.9 \times 10^{20}$ protons on target of anti-neutrino mode running. An automated selection is combined with hand scanning, with the former identifying five candidate $\Lambda$ production events when the signal was unblinded, consistent with the GENIE prediction of $5.3 \pm 1.1$ events. Several scanners were employed, selecting between three and five events, compared with a prediction from a blinded Monte Carlo simulation study of $3.7 \pm 1.0$ events. Restricting the phase space to only include $\Lambda$ baryons that decay above MicroBooNE's detection thresholds, we obtain a flux averaged cross section of $2.0^{+2.2}_{-1.7} \times 10^{-40}$ cm$^2/$Ar, where statistical and systematic uncertainties are combined