Prospects for measurement of neutrino-argon charged-current interactions with the COHERENT liquid argon detector

A core-collapse supernova burst (SNB) releases 99% of a star's gravitational potential energy via neutrinos over a period of several seconds. These neutrinos have energies in the few to 10s of MeV range. Lack of knowledge of low-energy neutrino cross sections will limit the amount of physics extracted during a future SNB. In particular, the electron neutrino-argon charged- current inelastic interaction (??_??CC) cross section has never been measured at the SNB neutrino energy range. Furthermore, different cross section calculations are only theoretically motivated and contain significant variations when comparing different models. The COHERENT liquid argon detector (COH-Ar-10) observes neutrinos with energies in the 10s of MeV at the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. COH-Ar-10 provides the opportunity to study the ??_??CC interaction at the relevant neutrino energy range for SNB neutrinos. To understand and characterize the COH-Ar-10 response to MeV-scale interactions, we first focused on analyzing signals produced by cosmic muons and Michel electrons, the latter having a similar energy distribution to the SNS ??_?? signal. This talk will detail preliminary studies focused on COH-Ar-10 detector sensitivity to cosmic muons and Michel electrons.