- Oct. 15, 2025, 3:30 pm US/Central
- Bruce Howard and Jaesung Kim
- Alex Himmel
The ICARUS detector, which serves as the far detector for the Short Baseline Neutrino (SBN) program using the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB), is also sensitive to neutrinos produced by the Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) beam at 800 m and 100 mrad off-axis. Due to this location and the contribution to neutrino fluxes from both pion and kaon decays, NuMI neutrino interactions in ICARUS typically range from a few hundred MeV to a few GeV. Given that uncertainties related to neutrino interactions may be leading sources of uncertainty in upcoming neutrino oscillation experiments and given DUNE’s oscillation peaks occur between approximately 2-3 GeV and near 1 GeV, NuMI neutrino interactions on argon in ICARUS can provide valuable insight leading up to the DUNE program and complementary to cross-section analysis in other experiments and targets and other neutrino-argon interaction measurements using the BNB beam. We report on the first ICARUS cross-section results, for which the signal is muon (anti-)neutrino charged-current interactions without pions in the final state, thus targeting charged-current quasi-elastic-like (CCQE-like) signatures. The measurement will be reported as a flux-averaged differential cross section as a function of a variety of kinematic variables, some of which exploit kinematic correlations between the outgoing muon and proton to maximize sensitivity to the poorly understood “nuclear effects” which can dominate systematic error budgets of oscillation measurements. This includes measurements of well-known observables that characterize the kinematic imbalance between the muon and proton on the plane transverse to the incoming neutrino. We will also highlight aspects of ICARUS and the broader physics and cross-section programs.