Methods to Determine Neutrino Flux at Low Energies:Investigation of the Low $\nu$ Method

Abstract

We investigate the "low-$\nu$" method (developed by the CCFR/NUTEV collaborations) to determine the neutrino flux in a wide band neutrino beam at very low energies, a region of interest to neutrino oscillations experiments. Events with low hadronic final state energy $\nu <{\nu }_{cut}$ (of 1, 2 and 5 GeV) were used by the MINOS collaboration to determine the neutrino flux in their measurements of neutrino (${\nu }_{\mu }$) and antineutrino ($\nub_μ$) total cross sections. The lowest ${\nu }_{\mu }$ energy for which the method was used in MINOS is 3.5 GeV, and the lowest $\nub_μ$ energy is 6 GeV. At these energies, the cross sections are dominated by inelastic processes. We investigate the application of the method to determine the neutrino flux for ${\nu }_{\mu }$, $\nub_μ$ energies as low as 0.7 GeV where the cross sections are dominated by quasielastic scattering and $\Delta$(1232) resonance production. We find that the method can be extended to low energies by using ${\nu }_{cut}$ values of 0.25 and 0.50 GeV, which is feasible in fully active neutrino detectors such as MINERvA.

25 pages, 32 figures, to be published in European Physics Journal C

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Cited by in corpus (12)

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• Neutrino Non-Standard Interactions: A Status Report
• Identification of nuclear effects in neutrino-carbon interactions at low three-momentum transfer
• Neutrino Mass Hierarchy
• $Z^{\prime }$s in neutrino scattering at DUNE
• A new method for an improved anti-neutrino energy reconstruction with charged-current interactions in next-generation detectors
• First Measurement of Energy-Dependent Inclusive Muon Neutrino Charged-Current Cross Sections on Argon with the MicroBooNE Detector
• Measurements of the Inclusive Neutrino and Antineutrino Charged Current Cross Sections in MINERvA Using the Low-$\nu$ Flux Method
• A Precise Determination of (Anti)neutrino Fluxes with (Anti)neutrino-Hydrogen Interactions
• Design and diagnostics of high-precision accelerator neutrino beams
• Progress in measurements of 0.1--10 GeV neutrino-nucleus scattering and anticipated results from future experiments
• A substandard candle: the low-$\nu$ method at few-GeV neutrino energies