MicroBooNE

07/07/2026

Congratulations to MicroBooNE's Magnus Handley, of University of Cambridge, who won the prize for best talk at the LLP2026 conference in Cambridge last week!

Magnus presented our recent searches for long-lived particles: hypothetical new particles that would travel some distance through the detector before decaying, and one of the most exciting places to look for physics beyond the Standard Model.

07/02/2026

Another new measurement from MicroBooNE, probing what happens when a neutrino interacts deep enough inside an argon nucleus to create a resonance: exciting one of the protons or neutrons up to a higher-energy state, which can then decay to produce a new particle such as a pion.

When a muon neutrino strikes an argon nucleus and produces a neutral pion, the particles that emerge should balance their momenta in the plane perpendicular to the beam. They don't quite, and that imbalance tells us about the nuclear physics inside the argon: the motion of the struck nucleon, and the re-scattering of particles on their way out. By measuring this 'transverse kinematic imbalance' with the muon, proton and pion, we can test how well our models capture these effects.

We find that none of the leading neutrino simulations reproduce all of the data, and this matters because these nuclear effects are among the largest uncertainties facing the next generation of oscillation experiments, including the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.

Neutrino-nucleus cross-section measurements are needed to improve interaction modeling and to enable precision neutrino oscillation measurements in upcoming experiments such as the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), Hyper-Kamiokande, and the Short-Baseline Neutrino program. Baryon-resonanc...

07/01/2026

New from MicroBooNE!

The first measurement of sub-GeV muon-neutrino charged-current coherent pion production on argon.

Coherent pion production is a rare and very clean process. Rather than striking a single proton or neutron, the neutrino interacts with the whole argon nucleus at once, leaving it intact and producing just a forward-going muon and pion. That simplicity makes it a powerful probe of the neutrino beam itself.

Measuring it on argon, at the low energies most relevant to future experiments, gives a valuable new tool for constraining flux uncertainties in oscillation measurements at the Fermilab Short-Baseline Neutrino programme and the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.

We report a measurement of the charged-current coherent pion production cross section on argon using the MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber exposed to the Booster Neutrino Beam at Fermilab. The measurement uses the MicroBooNE data set corresponding to $1.26 \times 10^{21}$ protons on ta...

06/29/2026

What an amazing week at Neutrino 2026, held at University of California, Irvine. Here's the MicroBooNE collaboration in the Californian sun.

The science spanned the whole field of neutrino physics: brand-new neutrino-oscillation measurements, neutrinoless double-β decay results, high-energy neutrinos, neutrino theory, cosmology, and more. It was a pleasure to be part of it, and exciting to see how much is still to come in the next few years.

06/26/2026

MicroBooNE out in force at Neutrino 2026!

Yesterday's second poster session featured twelve of our collaborators, a fantastic turnout spanning the full breadth of the experiment: precision measurements of neutrino interactions on argon, alongside our searches for new physics, from single-photon signatures to a dark-sector explanation of the MiniBooNE anomaly.

Twelve posters in a single session shows just how productive MicroBooNE remains, and how much of that work is driven by the PhD students and postdocs at the heart of the collaboration.

06/25/2026

Yesterday at Neutrino 2026, Patrick Green of University of Oxford gave the second of MicroBooNE's two talks, presenting the remarkable array of neutrino-interaction results the collaboration has produced recently.

It was phenomenal. Packing that much physics into 20 minutes is a huge challenge, and Patrick did it superbly. The talk showed just how prolific MicroBooNE has been, and what liquid-argon detectors are capable of.

The future is bright: these are the foundations for what we will go on to achieve with Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's Short-Baseline Neutrino programme and the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.

06/24/2026

Another proud day for MicroBooNE at Neutrino 2026!

Yesterday was the conference’s first poster session, and four of our collaborators presented work spanning the full breadth of the experiment, from precision measurements of neutrino interactions to searches for physics beyond the Standard Model.

06/23/2026

We’re at University of California, Irvine this week for Neutrino 2026, the flagship conference in neutrino physics, and MicroBooNE is giving two talks.

Yesterday Jay Hyun Jo (Brookhaven National Laboratory) gave the first, presenting our latest results on neutrino oscillations and new-physics searches. The headline: a brand-new limit on muon-neutrino disappearance.

It’s a milestone. MicroBooNE has now searched for sterile neutrinos across all three oscillation channels (electron-neutrino appearance, electron-neutrino disappearance, and now muon-neutrino disappearance) in a single detector, using a novel ‘two beams, one detector’ technique.

06/10/2026

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

06/09/2026

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.