| MiniBooNE seeks to corroborate or refute the unconfirmed oscillation result from the LSND experiment. If correct, the result implies that a new kind of massive neutrino, with no weak interactions, participates in neutrino oscillations. MiniBooNE searches for numu → nu e oscillations with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory 8 GeV beam line, which produces a numu beam with an average energy of ∼0.8 GeV and an intrinsic nu e content of 0.4%. The neutrino detector is a 6.1 m radius sphere filled with CH2, viewed by 1540 photo-multiplier tubes, and located 541 m downstream from the source. This work focuses on the estimation of systematic errors associated with the neutrino flux and neutrino interaction cross section predictions, and in particular, on constraining these uncertainties using in-situ MiniBooNE nu mu charged current quasi-elastic (CCQE) scattering data. A data set with ∼100,000 events is identified, with 91% CCQE purity. This data set is used to measure several parameters of the CCQE cross section: the axial mass, the Fermi momentum, the binding energy, and the functional dependence of the axial form factor on the square of the four-momentum transfer. Constraints on thenumu and nue fluxes are derived using the numu CCQE data set. A Monte Carlo study of a combined numu disappearance and nue appearance oscillation fit is presented, which improves the numu → nue oscillation sensitivity of MiniBooNE with respect to a nue appearance-only fit by 1.2-1.5sigma, depending on the value of Delta m2. |
