Track-Cluster Association within ND-GAr for DUNE

The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a prospective experiment that seeks to better understand neutrinos and their role in the matter-antimatter asymmetry within our universe. The experiment involves a neutrino beam with a near detector (ND) at the source of the beam at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois and a far detector (FD) 800 miles away at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. Our particular research endeavor focuses on a Gaseous Argon Time Projection Chamber surrounded by a calorimeter (ND-GAr) that is meant to serve as a detector component within ND during DUNE’s second project phase. Track/cluster association is an important goal within the functioning of ND-GAr as it allows us to identify and characterize the interactions that happen within the detector. However, in practice, the neutrino beam has a time width of 10 µs. This consequently introduces a position uncertainty in our efforts to carry out track/cluster association. We begin tackling this problem by characterizing the distribution of energy deposits within single particle Monte Carlo samples for different particle species. We introduce an optimization algorithm that uses the Gradient Descent technique to predict a radius within which most energy deposits should reside from a particle trajectory’s predicted intersection with the calorimeter. All in all, this endeavor lays out the necessary groundwork for handling track/cluster association within ND-GAr.