MicroBooNE

A new MicroBooNE paper on arXiv! This one investigates what liquid argon is capable of at low energies: the MeV scale. In this paper, we show that we can measure the energies of 1.6 MeV electron-positron pairs with a resolution of about 7.5%. This is the first ever measurement of MeV-scale energy resolution in a neutrino liquid-argon time projection chamber, and bodes well for the characterisation of low-energy neutrinos from the sun and from supernovae. Take a look here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30709

On Friday, MicroBooNE gave the weekly Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Wine & Cheese seminar, presented by Lucile Mellet of Michigan State University and Abbey Barnard of University of Oxford. They discussed two recent MicroBooNE papers reporting measurements of charged-current electron neutrino interactions on argon: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17342 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13593. Upcoming long-baseline experiments such as the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment will be searching for electron-neutrino appearance in muon-neutrino beams, so understanding electron-neutrino interactions through measurements such as these will be invaluable.

MicroBooNE is in Pittsburgh!

We're at University of Pittsburgh this week for our collaboration meeting. We had a fascinating visit to the Allegheny Observatory, which, as well as some impressive telescopes, is home to a sweetgum tree grown from seeds that orbited the moon on Artemis I.

We're delighted to welcome Mark Ross-Lonergan as co-spokesperson of MicroBooNE! Mark, from Columbia University, takes over from Matt Toups of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, who did an outstanding job leading the collaboration.

MicroBooNE has already made a remarkable impact, from searches for sterile neutrinos and beyond-Standard-Model physics, to precision measurements of neutrino interactions and novel liquid-argon detector techniques. But the science programme ahead of us is every bit as exciting, and we can't wait to share what's coming.

Welcome, Mark! 🎉

Mark Ross‑Lonergan elected co-spokesperson for MicroBooNE collaboration MicroBooNE, with its large neutrino detector at Fermilab, has wrapped up the data-collecting phase and will continue to conduct analysis under fresh leadership.

Last week was the UK Institute of Physics annual High Energy Particle Physics and Astroparticle Physics conference in Edinburgh.

MicroBooNE was well represented, with talks from Joe Bateman (University of Manchester / Imperial College London) and Magnus Handley (University of Cambridge). Great to see the collaboration’s work being shared with the wider community.

A really nice piece in Quanta Magazine capturing the current excitement in neutrino physics, including a great discussion of recent MicroBooNE results from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

Experiments Ring the ‘Death Knell’ for Sterile Neutrinos | Quanta Magazine Decades of weird experimental results appeared to support the existence of the sterile neutrino, a hypothetical particle that would solve multiple mysteries. But recent experiments have killed hope of finding these phantoms, leaving physicists to wonder what might explain their anomalies.

Newly published in Physical Review D, a search for particles—scalar bosons—that could indicate a portal, via the Higgs term, from the Standard Model to a dark sector. These scalar bosons would be produced in the NuMI beam and travel to the MicroBooNE detector where they would decay into electron-positron pairs. These kinds of searches for new sectors of dark-matter candidates are a key part of the physics programme of short-baseline neutrino experiments.

Read the paper here: https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/6myb-c3g1

A new MicroBooNE paper just released on the arXiv. This is a comprehensive review of MicroBooNE’s light simulation, the light-based triggering scheme, and the stability of the light response and photomultiplier gain calibration over five years of running. This is an important summary of how the scintillation in a liquid-argon detector evolves over an extended period of time. Take a look at https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23691

A new MicroBooNE paper! A new measurement of the electron-neutrino charged current cross section on argon, for interactions without any final-state pions. There are relatively few such measurements for electron neutrinos, so this is an important input for interaction models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13593

Great to see our science results being shared in South Dakota. And very exciting to see those huge caverns ready for the DUNE far detector.