Analysis of neutrino interactions in the OPERA experiment

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Fen Edebiyat Fakültesi, Fizik Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2012

Öğrenci: MUSTAFA KAMIŞCIOĞLU

Danışman: ALİ MURAT GÜLER

Özet:

OPERA stands for Oscillation Project with Emulsion t-Racking Apparatus. The main goal of the OPERA experiment is to search for tau neutrino appearance in almost pure muon neutrino beam. The detector is located at Gran Sasso, 730 km away from the neutrino source, at CERN. In this thesis, the reconstruction efficiency and purity of neutrino interactions in the OPERA target have been studied by using Monte Carlo simulation. The efficiency of primary vertex reconstruction for muon neutrino Charge Current (CC) events is estimated as 83.2 percent. The main source of inefficiency is due to Quasi-elastic like topologies in which only one track is reconstructed. The purity of primary vertex tracks is found to be 99 percent. On the other hand, the reconstruction efficiency for muon neutrino CC charm events is estimated to be 90.2 percent, while the purity of the primary tracks is 67 percent. The low purity is due the fact that the secondary vertex tracks are wrongly assigned in the primary vertex. This spoils the purity.