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

Abstract

We present double-differential measurements of antineutrino charged-current quasielastic scattering in the MINERvA detector. This study improves on a previous single-differential measurement by using updated reconstruction algorithms and interaction models and provides a complete description of observed muon kinematics in the form of a double-differential cross section with respect to muon transverse and longitudinal momentum. We include in our signal definition zero-meson final states arising from multinucleon interactions and from resonant pion production followed by pion absorption in the primary

Analysis of the MINERvA antineutrino double-differential cross sections within the SuSAv2 model including meson-exchange currents

“…For this reason, we also include in Figure 2 a comparative analysis between the bin-averaged "CCQE" GENIE and SuSAv2-MEC predictions, where the SuSAv2-MEC results seem to be larger than the GENIE ones at the extreme p T -bins and very close to them at the central values of p T . Overall, the comparison with MINERνA data is not very different for the two models, as we have checked by performing a χ 2 test using the data release from [1]. This test allows us to estimate quantitatively the level of agreement between data and predictions, accounting for the significant correlations between the data points.…”

“…In this energy region relativistic models are needed to describe the nuclear dynamics, while non-relativistic calculations are bound to fail. In this letter we compare the SuSAv2 results with the recent MINERvA measurement of double differential antineutrino cross section on a hydrocarbon target [1].…”

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We compare the results of the SuSAv2 model including meson-exchange currents (MEC) with the recent measurement of the quasielastic-like double differential antineutrino cross section on hydrocarbon (CH) performed by the MINERvA Collaboration [1]. The relativistic nature of the model makes it suitable to describe these data, which correspond to a mean beam energy of 3.5 GeV.

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“…For the data we use the same nomenclature employed in the experimental paper [1]. The "QE-like" experimental points include, besides pure quasielastic contributions, events that have post-FSI final states without mesons, prompt photons above nuclear de-excitation energies, heavy baryons, or protons above the proton tracking kinetic energy threshold of 120, thus including zero-meson final states arising from resonant pion production followed by pion absorption in the nucleus and from interactions on multinucleon states.…”

Realistic spectral function model for charged-current quasielastic-like neutrino and antineutrino scattering cross sections on C12

“…Concerning the treatment of 2p-2h excitations, we follow our previous studies in [33][34][35] that present a microscopic calculation by including a fully relativistic model for the weak charged-current MEC in both longitudinal and transverse channels, and with vector and axial-vector contributions. The present model is applied to CC0π (anti)neutrino scattering processes on carbon measured by the MiniBooNE [36,37], NO-MAD [38], T2K [39] and MINERνA [40][41][42][43] experiments spanning an energy range from hundreds of MeV up to 100 GeV. In all figures in the paper, as reference, the results of SuSAv2-MEC model [2] are also presented.…”