Measurement of muon plus proton final states inνμinteractions on hydrocarbon at⟨Eν⟩=

Abstract

A study of charged-current muon neutrino scattering on hydrocarbon in which the final state includes a muon, at least one proton, and no pions is presented. Although this signature has the topology of neutrino quasielastic scattering from neutrons, the event sample contains contributions from quasielastic and inelastic processes where pions are absorbed in the nucleus. The analysis accepts events with muon production angles up to 70 • and proton kinetic energies greater than 110 MeV. The cross section, when based completely on hadronic kinematics, is well-described by a relativistic Fermi gas nuclear model including the neutrino event generator modeling for inelastic processes and particle transportation through the nucleus. This is in contrast to the quasielastic cross section based on muon kinematics, which is best described by an extended model that incorporates multinucleon correlations. This measurement guides the formulation of a complete description of neutrino-nucleus interactions that encompasses the hadronic as well as the leptonic aspects of this process.

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

“…16, the flux-integrated cross sections measured in this paper and the one measured by MiniBooNE [9] are compared with the NEUT prediction. The MINERνA results [16,17] are not included since comparisons to these measurements would depend on model-dependent assumptions: the analysis presented in [17] includes only pure CCQE events after subtracting CC1π events where the pion is absorbed by the nuclear medium, and the analysis in Ref. [16] only includes events with both the muon and proton being reconstructed, and thus is dependent on the modeling of nucleon FSIs and nuclear effects.…”

“…At beam energies of 3-100 GeV, the NOMAD experiment has reported an M QE A of 1.05 AE 0.06 GeV [15]. The MINERνA (E ν ∼ 3.5 GeV) experiment has also measured the CCQE cross section with only a muon and a proton in the final state [16] which is consistent with the RFG model and M QE A ∼ 1 GeV. Interestingly, previous MINERνA CCQE measurements which use muon information and the calorimetric recoil energy with neutrinos [17] and antineutrinos [18] prefer a transverse enhancement model, suggesting the presence of meson exchange currents [19].…”

“…Analysis I uses two control regions to constrain the background parametrization, while Analysis II makes use of Monte Carlo predictions to estimate the background. Given the discrepancy between the present modeling of the CC1π process and the available measurements in MiniBooNE [9] and MINERνA [16,17], there are large uncertainties on this process and it is important to constrain them from T2K data. In Fig.…”

“…For the differential cross-section extraction, Analysis II uses an unfolding method to correct for detector effects, as with previous cross-section analyses by T2K [42,69], MiniBooNE [9] and MINERνA [9,16,17]. Analysis I uses a likelihood fit instead that is similar to the one used for T2K oscillation analyses [2].…”

Measurement of the muon antineutrino double-differential cross section for quasielastic-like scattering on hydrocarbon atEν∼3.5 GeV

“…The measurement complements other MINERvA QE-like studies that look in detail at the hadronic component of the final state [11] and that study neutrino interaction cross sections as a function of nuclear mass [12,13].…”