Ab initio Calculations of Lepton-Nucleus Scattering

Abstract

The advent of high precision measurements of neutrinos and their oscillations calls for accurate predictions of their interactions with nuclear targets utilized in the detectors. Over the past decade, ab initio methods based on realistic nuclear interactions and current operators were able to provide accurate description of lepton-nucleus scattering processes. Achieving a comprehensive description of the different reaction mechanisms active in the broad range of energies relevant for oscillation experiments required the introduction of controlled approximations of the nuclear many-body models. In this review, we give an overview of recent developments in the description of electroweak interactions within different approaches and discuss the future perspectives to support the experimental effort in this new precision era.

A Guided Tour of ab initio Nuclear Many-Body Theory

“…In mediummass nuclei, applications of SCGF and CC techniques to the computation of the nuclear response have been published in recent years. As mentioned in section 2.3.5, the Green's functions computed in the standard or Gor'kov ADC Green's function schemes inherently contain information about the nuclear response that has been used to study both electromagnetic and weak processes of medium-mass nuclei [119,120,[238][239][240].…”

Theoretical tools for neutrino scattering: interplay between lattice QCD, EFTs, nuclear physics, phenomenology, and neutrino event generators

“…Methods based on the factorization of the final hadronic state, such as those relying on the spectral function (SF) of the nucleus [64,250,392] and the short-time approximation (STA) [393] are suitable to study larger nuclear systems (A > 12) relevant to the experimental program, while retaining most of the important effects coming from multi-nucleon physics.…”

DUNE atmospheric neutrinos: Earth Tomography

“…Modeling neutrino-nucleus interactions at the 0.1-1 GeV region is remarkably challenging [42]. First, there are difficulties associated to the hard interaction itself, due to Fermi motion of the nucleons inside the nucleus and nuclear binding energy [43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53], in-medium effects that may change the local dispersion relation of those nucleons [54][55][56], and even nucleon-nucleon correlations in the nuclear medium [57][58][59][60][61][62][63]. Then, even if these obstacles are overcome, one still needs to properly model how nucleons propagate within the nucleus, including how the nuclear potential and intranuclear cascades affect the energy, angular and multiplicity distributions of final state nucleons [64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74].…”