Hadronic shower reconstruction for the SND@LHC experiment

The SND@LHC experiment aims to measure the cross-section of high-energy neutrinos produced in LHC collisions to study charmed hadron production and extract the gluon PDF at low momentum fractions. In this project, the first procedure for hadronic shower energy and vertex position reconstruction is developed for the SND detector. Shower propagation is profiled using PDFs and a log-likelihood function is built to reconstruct energy and vertex. Energy reconstruction is successful for showers initiated early in the target. For showers initiated further downstream low energies are overestimated while high energies are underestimated. Vertex reconstruction consistently overestimates the initiation depth, with the performance improving for later showering and higher energies. A discrepancy is identified with the true shower vertex depth. Results suggest vertex reconstruction would perform significantly better if the true vertex depth is corrected.