Joshua Spitz

More than 80 years after its proposed existence, the neutrino remains largely mysterious and elusive. Precision measurements of the neutrino’s properties are just now beginning to take place. Such measurements are required in order to determine the mass of the neutrino, how many neutrinos there are, if neutrinos are different than anti-neutrinos, and more.

Muon-neutrino charged-current differential cross sections on an argon target in terms of the outgoing muon momentum and angle are presented. The measurements have been taken with the ArgoNeuT Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) experiment. ArgoNeuT is the first LArTPC to ever take data in a low energy neutrino beam, having collected thousands of neutrino and anti-neutrino events in the NuMI beamline at Fermi-lab. The results are relevant for long baseline neutrino oscillation experiments searching for non-zero theta13, CP-violation in the lepton sector, and the sign of the neutrino mass hierarchy, among other things. Furthermore, the differential cross sections are important for understanding the nature of the neutrino-nucleus interaction in general. These measurements represent a significant step forward for LArTPC technology as they are among the first neutrino physics results with such a device.