Abstract
We study neutrino-induced charged-current (CC) π0 production on carbon nuclei using events with fully imaged final-state proton-π0 systems. Novel use of final-state correlations based on transverse kinematic imbalance enables the first measurements of the struck nucleon's Fermi motion, of the intranuclear momentum transfer (IMT) dynamics, and of the final-state hadronic momentum configuration in neutrino pion production. Event distributions are presented for (i) the momenta of neutrino-struck neutrons below the Fermi surface, (ii) the direction of missing transverse momentum characterizing the strength of IMT, and (iii) proton-pion momentum imbalance with respect to the lepton scattering plane. The observed Fermi motion and IMT strength are compared to the previous MINERνA measurement of neutrino CC quasielastic-like production. The measured shapes and absolute rates of these distributions, as well as the cross section asymmetries, show tensions with predictions from current neutrino generator models.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 072007 |
Journal | Physical Review D |
Volume | 102 |
Issue number | 7 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Oct 19 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We thank Luis Alvarez Ruso for helpful comments on the paper. This document was prepared by members of the Collaboration using the resources of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), a U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, HEP User Facility. Fermilab is managed by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC (FRA), acting under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359. These resources included support for the construction project, and support for construction also was granted by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grant No. PHY-0619727 and by the University of Rochester. Support for participating scientists was provided by NSF and DOE (USA); by CAPES and CNPq (Brazil); by CoNaCyT (Mexico); by Proyecto Basal FB 0821, CONICYT PIA ACT1413, Fondecyt 3170845 and 11130133 (Chile); by CONCYTEC (Consejo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnologa e Innovacin Tecnolgica), DGI-PUCP (Direccin de Gestin de la Investigacin—Pontificia Universidad Catlica del Peru), and VRI-UNI (Vice-Rectorate for Research of National University of Engineering) (Peru); and by the Latin American Center for Physics (CLAF); NCN Opus Grant No. 2016/21/B/ST2/01092 (Poland); by Magdalen College Oxford and Science and Technology Facilities Council (UK). We thank the MINOS Collaboration for use of its near detector data. Finally, we thank the staff of Fermilab for support of the beam line, the detector, and computing infrastructure.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.