Abstract
In order for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment to achieve its primary physics goals, it must possess unprecedented experimental capabilities in order to effectively reconstruct the residues an interacting neutrino can leave, including photon emissions. Presently, scintillation light analysis in liquid argon (LAr) based neutrino detectors is restrained due to uncertainty in fundamental constants, like the Rayleigh scattering length of LAr. In the fall of 2023, the TallBo cryostat, located at Fermilab, was used to measure the scattering length of LAr in the Liquid Argon Scattering (LArS) experiment. LArS's results did not qualitatively match our expectations. By simulating the LArS experiment, we found strong evidence that this discrepancy was caused by a misaligned silicon photomultiplier. To account for this, we developed two analysis pipelines that correct or emulate the experimental data. With this foundation, we may be able to find correction factors or directly simulate the misaligned reality, then extract a scattering length measurement from the experimental data. LArS has great promise of delivering a scattering length measurement of LAr with further developement of these pipelines. This measurement is critical to scintillation light analysis, which will make event reconstruction methods used by the large LAr time projection chambers of DUNE more precise.
*a. This work was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Workforce Development. This manuscript has been authored by FermiForward Discovery Group, LLC under Contract No. 89243024CSC000002 with the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics. b. This work was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists (WDTS) under the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships Program (SULI)
