Neutrino interactions with nuclei

Abstract

Current long baseline (LBL) experiments aim at measuring neutrino oscillation parameters with a high precision. A critical quantity is the neutrino energy which can not be measured directly but has to be reconstructed from the observed hadrons. A good knowledge of neutrino-nucleus interactions is thus necessary to minimize the systematic uncertainties in neutrino fluxes, backgrounds and detector responses. In particular final-state interactions inside the target nucleus modify considerably the particle yields through rescattering, charge-exchange and absorption. Nuclear effects can be described with our coupled channel GiBUU transport model where the neutrino first interacts with a bound nucleon producing secondary particles which are then transported out of the nucleus. In this contribution, we give some examples for the application of our model focusing in particular on the MiniBooNE and K2K experiments.

A new analysis of the MiniBooNE low-energy excess

“…This enhancement of the ∆ → N γ background due to π 0 FSI in the 12 C nucleus is in approximate agreement with the theoretical estimation of a factor about 2.4 in ref. [24] and it is larger than the factor [S MB C (π 0 )] −1 = 1.6 considered by the MiniBooNE collaboration [20].…”

Polarization transfer in weak pion production off the nucleon

“…The C A 5 is also computed theoretically within chiral field theory [90][91][92][93][94][95] and the lattice QCD [96,97] as well. But still the most reliable information about C A 5 comes from the analysis of the ν-deuteron ANL and BNL scattering data [1,17,27,32,37,51,[98][99][100][101]. In this work we shall investigate the impact of the C A 5 axial form factor on the polarization observables.…”