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arXiv · 2509.17123

Facilitating neutron and energy reconstruction in neutrino events using the direction of tagged neutrons

Steven Manly·Mitchell Lahare·Hilary Utaegbulam·David Last
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Abstract

To date, accelerator neutrino experiments have had only limited success including neutrons in the neutrino event reconstruction event by event. Produced neutrons often interact in a detector leaving an energy deposition that does not correlate strongly with the kinetic energy of the neutron. This work explores the inclusion of the direction of a neutron tagged by such an energy deposition in concert with the missing transverse momentum of the reconstructed particles to determine the approximate kinetic energy of the neutron and modify the reconstruction of the energy of the incoming neutrino. The technique significantly increases the neutron kinetic energy estimation relative to one that assigns the neutron kinetic energy by enforcing transverse momentum balance alone. When included in the neutrino energy calculation, the neutrino energy resolution is improved and the reconstructed energy is distributed more symmetrically around the true value. The technique shows promise and might be used to good effect to analyze data taken with experiments able to tag neutron energy deposits with good neutron direction resolution such as the T2K near detector and the liquid argon detectors in the SBN program and DUNE.

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Steven Manly, Mitchell Lahare, Hilary Utaegbulam, David Last. 2026-09-14. Facilitating neutron and energy reconstruction in neutrino events using the direction of tagged neutrons. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17123

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