Novel Neutral Current Neutrino Energy Estimator and Application to the Sterile NeutrinoSearch at the Short-Baseline Neutrino Program (SBN)

Liquid argon time projection chambers, such as those part of the Short-Baseline Neutrino Program

(SBN), provide an unprecedented amount of information about GeV-scale interactions. This wealth

of information motivates a novel method of neutrino energy estimation in neutral current (NC)

interactions using solely the final-state hadronic kinematics. This method has implications in the

search for sterile neutrinos at SBN since it may enable the observation of shape differences in the

NC neutrino energy spectrum. The method and a statistics-only 3+1 NC disappearance sensitivity

were explored at the generator level in previous work (PhysRevD.103.112011). While the results of

this study are promising, they are dependent on the accuracy of the modeling of nuclear effects. By

applying this method to charged current (CC) muon neutrino interactions to predict the outgoing

muon kinematics, the impact of nuclear modeling on the method can be tested against data. In this

talk, I present the method and its application to an NC disappearance search, as well as progress in

testing the method using CC interactions, with MicroBooNE data.