A quantitative understanding of the weak nuclear response is a prerequisite for the analyses of neutrino experiments such as K2K and MiniBOONE, which measure energy and angle of the muons produced in neutrino-nucleus interactions in the energy range 0:5-3 GeV and reconstruct the incident neutrino energy to determine neutrino oscillations. In this paper we discuss theoretical calculations of electron-and neutrino-nucleus scattering, carried out within the impulse approximation scheme using realistic nuclear spectral functions. Comparison between electron scattering data and the calculated inclusive cross section of oxygen, at beam energies ranging between 700 and 1200 MeV, show that the Fermi gas model, widely used in the analysis of neutrino oscillation experiments, fails to provide a satisfactory description of the measured cross sections, and inclusion of nuclear dynamics is needed.

Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

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Reaction mechanisms of the ultrafast photoisomerization between cyclohexadiene and hexatriene have been elucidated by the quantum dynamics on the ab initio potential energy surfaces calculated by multireference configuration interaction method. In addition to the quantum wave-packet dynamics along the two-dimensional reaction coordinates, the semiclassical analyses have also been carried out to correctly estimate the nonadiabatic transition probabilities around conical intersections in the full-dimensional space. The reaction time durations of radiationless decays in the wave-packet dynamics are found to be generally consistent with the femtosecond time-resolution experimental observations. The nonadiabatic transition probabilities among the ground (S0), first (S1), and second (S2) excited states have been estimated by using the semiclassical Zhu-Nakamura formula considering the full-dimensional wave-packet density distributions in the vicinity of conical intersections under the harmonic normal mode approximation. The cyclohexadiene (CHD) ring-opening process proceeds descending on the S1(1 1B) potential after the photoexcitation. The major part of the wave-packet decays from S1(1 1B) to S1(2 1A) by the first seam line crossing along the C2-symmetry-breaking directions. The experimentally observed ultrafast S1-S0 decay can be explained by the dynamics through the S1-S0 conical intersection along the direction toward the five-membered ring. The CHD: hexatriene (HT) branching ratio is estimated to be approximately 5:5, which is in accordance with the experiment in solution. This branching ratio is found to be mainly governed by the location of the five-membered ring S1-S0 conical intersection along the ground state potential ridge between CHD and HT.

The instanton theory is reformulated with use of the path integral approach and the Wentzel–Kramers–Brillouin approximation to the Schrödinger equation. Both approaches are shown to provide the same results. A new practically useful semiclassical formula is derived for the tunneling splitting of the ground state, which can be implemented for high-dimensional systems. The theory is applicable to systems of arbitrary Riemannian metric and is also supplemented by a practical numerical recipe to evaluate the instanton trajectory, i.e., periodic orbit, in multidimensional space. Numerical examples are presented for three-dimensional (3D) and 21D systems of HO2 and malonaldehyde, respectively.