First Measurement of Energy-Dependent Inclusive Muon Neutrino Charged-Current Cross Sections on Argon with the MicroBooNE Detector

We report a measurement of the energy-dependent total charged-current cross section σ(E_ν) for inclusive muon neutrinos scattering on argon, as well as measurements of flux-averaged differential cross sections as a function of muon energy and hadronic energy transfer (ν). Data corresponding to 5.3×10¹⁹ protons on target of exposure were collected using the MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber located in the Fermilab booster neutrino beam with a mean neutrino energy of approximately 0.8 GeV. The mapping between the true neutrino energy E_ν and reconstructed neutrino energy E_νʳᵉᶜ and between the energy transfer ν and reconstructed hadronic energy Ehadʳᵉᶜ are validated by comparing the data and Monte Carlo (MC) predictions. In particular, the modeling of the missing hadronic energy and its associated uncertainties are verified by a new method that compares the Ehadʳᵉᶜ distributions between data and a MC prediction after constraining the reconstructed muon kinematic distributions, energy, and polar angle to those of data. The success of this validation gives confidence that the missing energy in the MicroBooNE detector is well modeled and underpins first-time measurements of both the total cross section σ(E_ν) and the differential cross section dσ/dν on argon.