MicroBooNE, in 3-D


Imagine your job is to analyze the data coming from Fermilab’s MicroBooNE experiment.


But that experiment could not adequately separate the production of electrons from the production of photons, which would not indicate a new particle. MicroBooNE’s detector, an 89-ton active volume liquid-argon time projection chamber, will be able to. To take advantage of this, every neutrino interaction in the chamber will have to be examined to determine if it created an electron or a photon.


If all goes to plan, human operators won’t have to worry about any of that. When MicroBooNE switches on next summer, it will sport one of the most sophisticated 3-D reconstruction software programs ever designed for a neutrino experiment.

According to Wesley Ketchum and Tingjun Yang, two postdocs leading the software development team at Fermilab, MicroBooNE’s computers will be able to accurately reconstruct neutrino interactions and automatically filter the ones that create electrons. The key to accomplishing this lies in the design of the time projection chamber.


“Three planes of wires at different angles will provide a picture of the neutrino interaction in 3-D,” Ketchum said. “We only need two, but the third helps us get rid of ambiguity.”


“We’re focused on creating an automated reconstruction package that won’t require people to go through and give input,” Ketchum said. “We hope that we will have the raw data, and the software will give us all the particles produced when a neutrino interacts, with no human needed.”

While Ketchum, Yang and the MicroBooNE team work on perfecting the software, they know that even more eyes are on them. The 3-D reconstruction technology used for MicroBooNE will be a smaller version of that used in the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment, Fermilab’s flagship project. LBNE will use a much larger liquid-argon TPC and will require automated reconstruction.


“It will run for at least three years and give us a definite answer to the MiniBooNE anomaly,” Yang said.

Andre Salles