A Measurement of Coherent Neutral Pion Production in Neutrino Neutral Current Interactions in NOMAD

Abstract

We present a study of exclusive neutral pion production in neutrino-nucleus Neutral Current interactions using data from the NOMAD experiment at the CERN SPS. The data correspond to $1.44\times 10^6$ muon-neutrino Charged Current interactions in the energy range $2.5\le E_{\nu }\le 300$ GeV. Neutrino events with only one visible ${\pi }^0$ in the final state are expected to result from two Neutral Current processes: coherent ${\pi }^0$ production, {\boldmath $\nu +\mathcal{A}\to \nu +\mathcal{A}+{\pi }^0$} and single ${\pi }^0$ production in neutrino-nucleon scattering. The signature of coherent ${\pi }^0$ production is an emergent ${\pi }^0$ almost collinear with the incident neutrino while ${\pi }^0$'s produced in neutrino-nucleon deep inelastic scattering have larger transverse momenta. In this analysis all relevant backgrounds to the coherent ${\pi }^0$ production signal are measured using data themselves. Having determined the backgrounds, and using the Rein-Sehgal model for the coherent ${\pi }^0$ production to compute the detection efficiency, we obtain {\boldmath $4630\pm 522(stat)\pm 426(syst)$} corrected coherent-${\pi }^0$ events with $E_{{\pi }^0}\ge 0.5$ GeV. We measure {\boldmath $\sigma (\nu \mathcal{A}\to \nu \mathcal{A}{\pi }^0)=[72.6\pm 8.1(stat)\pm 6.9(syst)]\times 10^{-40}c{m}^2/nucleus$}. This is the most precise measurement of the coherent ${\pi }^0$ production to date.

23 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Lett. B

References in corpus (6)

• A Precise Measurement of the Muon Neutrino-Nucleon Inclusive Charged Current Cross-Section off an Isoscalar Target in the Energy Range 2.5 < E_ν< 40 GeV by NOMAD
• First Observation of Coherent ${\pi }^0$ Production in Neutrino Nucleus Interactions with $E_{\nu }<$ 2 GeV
• Nuclear Effects in Neutrino Induced Coherent Pion Production at K2K and MiniBooNE Neutrino Energies
• Final results on nu_mu to nu_tau oscillation from the CHORUS experiment
• Neutral current coherent pion production
• Coherent pion production by neutrinos on nuclei

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