South Dakota scientists achieve first-ever measurement of rare neutrino interaction

Scientists at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology have achieved the first-ever measurement of neutrino-induced kaon production in argon. The team led the analysis of data collected by the MicroBooNE experiment at Fermilab in Illinois. Researchers Martinez Caicedo and Jairo Rodriguez published the findings in Physical Review Letters. Mines served as the lead institution for the work, with Rodriguez directing the project during his doctoral research. Former postdoctoral researcher Arturo Fiorentini contributed in the early stages. The experiment involved directing a neutrino beam into a liquid argon detector and searching for signs of the rare interaction. Analysis of three years of data revealed 10 candidate events among hundreds of thousands of neutrino interactions. Eight of the candidates were identified as kaon production events, detected with the aid of the detector's millimeter-level precision imaging system. Rodriguez said out of hundreds of thousands of neutrino interactions over several years, the team identified just 10 candidate events, and from those determined eight out of 10 to be kaon candidates in the detector.