Consistent analysis of neutral- and charged-current neutrino scattering off carbon

Abstract

Background. Good understanding of the cross sections for (anti)neutrino scattering off nuclear targets in the few-GeV energy region is a prerequisite for the correct interpretation of results of ongoing and planned oscillation experiments. Purpose. Clarify a possible source of disagreement between recent measurements of the cross sections on carbon. Method. Nuclear effects in (anti)neutrino scattering off carbon nucleus are described using the spectral function approach. The effect of two-and multinucleon final states is accounted for by applying an effective value of the axial mass, fixed to 1.23 GeV. Neutral-current elastic (NCE) and charged-current quasielastic (CCQE) processes are treated on equal footing. Results. The differential and total cross sections for the energy ranging from a few hundreds of MeV to 100 GeV are obtained and compared to the available data from the BNL E734, MiniBooNE, and NOMAD experiments. Conclusions. Nuclear effects in NCE and CCQE scattering seem to be very similar. Within the spectral function approach, the axial mass from the shape analysis of the MiniBooNE data is in good agreement with the results reported by the BNL E734 and NOMAD Collaborations. However, the combined analysis of the NCE and CCQE data does not seem to support the contribution of multinucleon final states being large enough to explain the normalization of the MiniBooNE-reported cross sections.

Relativistic description of final-state interactions in neutral-current neutrino and antineutrino cross sections

“…At intermediate energy, quasielastic (QE) electron scattering calculations [28,29], which are able to successfully describe a wide number of experimental data, can provide a useful tool to study neutrino-induced processes. However, some of these models based on the impulse approximation (IA) have been shown to be unable to describe the MiniBooNE data for both charged-current (CC) and neutral-current (NC) reactions [30][31][32][33]. This has been viewed as an indication that the reaction can have significant contributions from effects beyond the IA.…”

Neutral current quasielastic (anti)neutrino scattering beyond the Fermi gas model at MiniBooNE and BNL kinematics

“…We note also that recent data on antineutrinonucleus scattering are reported in [45] and [46]. It is known that analyses of nuclear effects in neutrino scattering are generally regarded as one of the main sources of systematic uncertainties in oscillation experiments, in particular, when it concerns the understanding of charged current/quasielastic (CCQE) interactions with nucleons bound in the nucleus (e.g., [47]) in the energy range of around 1 GeV. For energies of a few GeV, the -resonance excitation becomes equally important [48] (but keep in mind that here the nuclear uncertainties are even larger).…”

“…35 GeV. An enhancement of the world-average axial mass is required also in other models based on the impulse approximation (e.g., [47] and [49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56]). This is an indication that models based on the impulse approximation may lack important contributions to the processes of neutrino-nucleus scattering.…”

“…In [47] the differential and total cross sections for energies ranging from a few hundred MeV to 100 GeV have been obtained and compared with the data from BNL E734, MiniBooNE, and NOMAD (see Ref. [68]).…”

Measurement of double-differential muon neutrino charged-current interactions onC8H8without pions in the final state using the

“…These were not needed in the models designed to describe bubble-chamber data on deuterium targets. Various different implementations of such nuclear effects have been proposed [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. In experimental measurements the effects of nucleon and hadron initial and final state interactions with the nucleus cannot typically be disentangled from the fundamental neutrino-interaction cross section.…”