Abstract
Neutrino charged-current quasielastic-like scattering, a reaction category extensively used in neutrino oscillation measurements, probes nuclear effects that govern neutrino-nucleus interactions. This Letter reports the first measurement of the triple-differential cross section for νμ quasielastic-like reactions using the hydrocarbon medium of the MINERvA detector exposed to a wideband beam spanning 2≤Eν≤20 GeV. The measurement maps the correlations among transverse and longitudinal muon momenta and summed proton kinetic energies, and compares them to predictions from a state-of-art simulation. Discrepancies are observed that likely reflect shortfalls with modeling of pion and nucleon intranuclear scattering and/or spectator nucleon ejection from struck nuclei. The separate determination of leptonic and hadronic variables can inform experimental approaches to neutrino-energy estimation.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 021803 |
| Journal | Physical review letters |
| Volume | 129 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 8 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This document was prepared by members of the MINERvA 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 MINERvA construction project, and support for construction also was granted by the United States 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 ANID PIA/APOYO AFB180002, CONICYT PIA ACT1413, and Fondecyt 3170845 and 11130133 (Chile); by CONCYTEC (Consejo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Tecnológica), DGI-PUCP (Dirección de Gestión de la Investigación—Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru), and VRI-UNI (Vice-Rectorate for Research of National University of Engineering) (Peru); NCN Opus Grant No. 2016/21/B/ST2/01092 (Poland); by Science and Technology Facilities Council (UK); by EU Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action; by an Imperial College London President’s PhD Scholarship. D. R. gratefully acknowledges support from a Cottrell Postdoctoral Fellowship, Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement Grant No. 27467 and National Science Foundation Grant No. CHE2039044. 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:
© 2022 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.