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Past Event

Wouter Van de Pontseele - Harvard University

December 4, 2019
2:40 PM - 3:40 PM
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705 Pupin Hall

"The MicroBooNE Neutrino Experiment at Fermilab"

MicroBooNE is a liquid argon time projection chamber in the Booster Neutrino Beam at Fermilab. The technology provides high-resolution imaging of neutrino interactions leading to low-threshold event reconstruction with full angular coverage. As such, this is an ideal place to probe neutrino-argon interactions in the hundreds-of MeV to few-GeV energy range. This talk presents a start-to-end overview demonstrating the physics capabilities of the detector. I will talk about cosmic ray measurement and characterisation, our dominant background. Furthermore, I will describe the flavour-agnostic neutrino pre-selection, based on the combination of the charge collected by the TPC and the optical information form the PMT system. An overview of recent measurements of neutrino interactions in MicroBooNE, including inclusive charged-current interactions, will be given. I will conclude summarising the ongoing efforts towards our first low-energy-excess results, demonstrating our capability to identify electron neutrinos.


Wouter Van de Pontseele obtained his BSc and MSc in Belgium at the University of Ghent. The particle physics group at Ghent gave Wouter the opportunity to gain experience in different collaborations located at CERN (SPS, slow extraction), Madison (IceCube) and Imperial College London (SoLid).

Currently, Wouter is in the last year of his PhD at Oxford University while being connected as a research fellow to Harvard University. The topic of his PhD is neutrino selection and cosmic background characterisation in the MicroBooNE detector. More specifically Wouter is looking at Charged Current Electron Neutrino interactions in the Booster Neutrino Beam. This channel is the most inclusive way to investigate the excess observed by the MiniBooNE detector. 

More details on Wouter's research can be found here.