Carbon Nuclear Deexcitation in MINERνA Data: an Update

Abstract

The goal of this project is to find evidence of carbon nuclear deexcitation in MINERνA’s neutrino collision data. We know, physically, that such events must take place in the plasticscintillator detector. Nuclear deexcitation of oxygen is fully simulated, but the MINERνA simulations do not include carbon deexcitation. By isolating regions of the data expected to have the highest concentration of the deexcitation events, we found strong evidence of carbon deexcitation in the data. The existing simulation of oxygen deexcitation was used to emulate the carbon deexcitation in time. From this, we scaled up the oxygen simulation to estimate the number of carbon deexcitation events, shown in Fig. 1. The different subsamples yielded a range of inferred carbon deexcitations; this range is likely dependent on the neutron background.