Measurement of the neutrino-oxygen neutral-current interaction cross section by observing nuclear deexcitation $\gamma$ rays

Abstract

We report the first measurement of the neutrino-oxygen neutral-current quasielastic (NCQE) cross section. It is obtained by observing nuclear deexcitation $\gamma$-rays which follow neutrino-oxygen interactions at the Super-Kamiokande water Cherenkov detector. We use T2K data corresponding to $3.01\times 10^{20}$ protons on target. By selecting only events during the T2K beam window and with well-reconstructed vertices in the fiducial volume, the large background rate from natural radioactivity is dramatically reduced. We observe 43 events in the $4-30$ MeV reconstructed energy window, compared with an expectation of 51.0, which includes an estimated 16.2 background events. The background is primarily nonquasielastic neutral-current interactions and has only 1.2 events from natural radioactivity. The flux-averaged NCQE cross section we measure is $1.55\times 10^{-38}$ cm${}^2$ with a 68\% confidence interval of $(1.22,2.20)\times 10^{-38}$ cm${}^2$ at a median neutrino energy of 630 MeV, compared with the theoretical prediction of $2.01\times 10^{-38}$ cm${}^2$.

10 pages, 6 figures

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• Measurement of neutrino and antineutrino neutral-current quasielastic-like interactions on oxygen by detecting nuclear de-excitation $\gamma$-rays
• Measurement of neutrino-oxygen neutral-current quasi-elastic cross section using atmospheric neutrinos at Super-Kamiokande
• Estimate of the theoretical uncertainty of the cross sections for nucleon knockout in neutral-current neutrino-oxygen interactions
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• Separation of gamma-ray and neutron events with CsI(Tl) pulse shape analysis
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• Measurement of $\gamma$-rays generated by neutron interaction with ${}^{16}$O at 30 MeV and 250 MeV
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• Towards a Unified Model of Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions