Alec Aivazis edited results.tex  almost 10 years ago

Commit id: 56b986eeb19730b4626ab21b7cf53459ead4f763

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Since the Near Detector (ND) is so close to the NuMI beam, it measures the particle before it has had a chance to oscillate or interact with other matter, providing an idea of what results are reasonable in the Far Detector (FD). The data recorded by the ND is separated into 4 different "channels" that are treated seprately. These channels are: muon neutrinos, charged interactions, neutral interactions, and neutral interactions with small $\nu_{e}$ behavior.   Muon neutrinos travel much farther in the detector than electron, making them considerably easier to detect. See figure \ref{fig:tracks} for more details. From this, its clear that charged interactions do not make up a large amount of the background measurements. The largest source is from neutral currents whose hadronic showers are occasionally misidentified as an electromagnetic shower similar to that of a muon neutrino \cite{Sachdev_2013}. One method, outlined in \cite{Sachdev_2013}, estimates the amount of hadronic showers produced by a neutral interaction by removing from data those events where the Near Detector measured a muon. It is important to note that sometimes these are not in fact muons but other particles that have been misidentified. This "Muon-Removed Charged Current" provides a channel that does not contain the main event to be measured by the detectors and provides a data-based way to determine which events would produced charged electromagnetic showers and be identified as coming from a muon neutrino in the Far Detector.