Steven Linden

Steven Linden's picture
Detector Physicist
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Research Areas: 
Particle Physics
Research Type: 
Experimentalist
Education: 
Ph.D. 2011, Yale University
Advisor: 
Bonnie Fleming
Dissertation Title: 
Measurement of the muon neutrino charged current pion production to quasi-elastic cross section ratio on mineral oil in a 0.8 GeV neutrino beam
Dissertation Abstract: 

Charged current single pion production (CCπ +) and charged current quasi-elastic scattering (CCQE) are the most abundant interaction types for neutrinos at energies around 1 GeV, a region of great interest to oscillation experiments. The cross-sections for these processes, however, are not well understood in this energy range. This dissertation presents a measurement of the ratio of CCπ + to CCQE cross-sections for muon neutrinos on mineral oil (CH2) in the MiniBooNE experiment. The measurement is presented here both with and without corrections for hadronic re-interactions in the target nucleus and is given as a function of neutrino energy in the range 0.4 GeV < Ev < 2.4 GeV. With more than 46,000 CCπ+ events collected in MiniBooNE, and with a fractional uncertainty of roughly 11% in the region of highest statistics, this measurement represents a dramatic improvement in statistics and precision over previous CCπ+ and CCQE measurements.