ICEBERG Low-Energy Analysis in Preparation for DUNE

ICEBERG is a small liquid argon time projection chamber at Fermilab, built to test cold electronics for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), which is designed to answer broad questions about neutrino oscillation physics and is currently under construction. In addition to testing different types of front-end electronics for the detector readout, ICEBERG also serves as a prototype to test DUNE trigger capabilities for identifying neutrinos from supernovas. Efficient triggering would require real-time discrimination between low-energy supernova neutrino signals and other low-energy backgrounds such as Argon-39 beta decays, cosmic ray spallation products, and electronics noise. This talk concerns the discrimination between these sources of low-energy deposits. First, we developed a data-driven simulation of ICEBERG noise. Then, we trained a Convolutional Neural Network on simulated data to identify low-energy physics signals among detector noise and other backgrounds. The first application of this separation will be to secure a sample of Ar-39 radiological deposits and use it for detector calibration, including measurements of electric field distortions and argon purity in ICEBERG, which will serve as a proof-of-concept for this same procedure in DUNE.