Confronting electron- and neutrino-nucleus scattering

Abstract

The analysis of the sample of charged current quasi elastic events collected by the MiniBooNE Collaboration suggests that the scheme successfully employed to describe electron-nucleus scattering fails to explain neutrino-nucleus cross sections. I argue that, due to flux average, the double differential neutrino-nucleus cross section does not allow for a clearcut determination of the dominant reaction mechanism. A systematic study of the large body of electron scattering data may help to identify the processes, other than single nucleon knockout, contributing to the observed neutrino cross section.

arXiv commentInvited paper to NUFACT 11, XIIIth International Workshop on Neutrino Factories, Super Beams and Beta Beams, 1-6 August 2011, CERN and University of Geneva (submitted to IOP conference series)