Experimental Neutrino Physics

Congratulations to Jessica Esquivel, who defended her Ph.D. dissertation last week.   Jessica gave an excellent overview of her  thesis topic, “Muon/pion separation using Convolutional Neural Networks(CNNs) for the MicroBooNE charged current inclusive cross section measurement.”, and it was great to have her back in Syracuse for a few days.

Our group is getting ready to start wiring 2 Anode Plane Assemblies (APAs) for the SBND experiment.  We are performing this construction work in the newly renovated Wright Laboratory at Yale University, where we collaborate with the group led by Bonnie Fleming.  This February, after  many trips to Yale over the past year by Mitch/Pip/Avinay, we have completed the construction of the wiring apparatus, and look forward to starting production soon!

Pip Hamilton is finishing up his stint as MicroBooNE Run-Coordinator.  This is an important job that the experiment depends on for smooth operations.  This past week the transition was marked with the ceremonial cake, owl-themed in Pip’s honor.  Job well done!

Jessica Esquivel gave a very nice update last week at the MicroBooNE collaboration meeting about her work to use “deep learning” tools to separate muons and pions in the CC-Inclusive cross-section analysis.  She included this animation, which shows a “deep learning” algorithm learning how to distinguish between five different particle types.  This work was done using the SUrge GPU cluster at Syracuse University.