Electron Neutrino Charged-Current Quasielastic Scattering in the MINERvA Experiment

Abstract

The electron-neutrino charged-current quasielastic (CCQE) cross section on nuclei is an important input parameter for electron neutrino appearance oscillation experiments. Current experiments typically begin with the muon neutrino cross section and apply theoretical corrections to obtain a prediction for the electron neutrino cross section. However, at present no experimental verification of the estimates for this channel at an energy scale appropriate to such experiments exists. We present the cross sections for a CCQE-like process determined using the MINERvA detector, which are the first measurements of any exclusive reaction in few-GeV electron neutrino interactions. The result is given as differential cross-sections vs. the electron energy, electron angle, and square of the four-momentum transferred to the nucleus, $Q^2$. We also compute the ratio to a muon neutrino cross-section in $Q^2$ from MINERvA. We find satisfactory agreement between these measurements and the predictions of the GENIE generator. We furthermore report on a photon-like background unpredicted by the generator which we interpret as neutral-coherent diffractive scattering from hydrogen.

Proceedings for 10th International Workshop on Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions in the Few-GeV Region (NuInt15)

References in corpus (9)

• Design, Calibration, and Performance of the MINERvA Detector
• Measurement of Muon Antineutrino Quasi-Elastic Scattering on a Hydrocarbon Target at E_ν ~ 3.5 GeV
• Differences in Quasi-Elastic Cross-Sections of Muon and Electron Neutrinos
• Energy reconstruction in quasielastic scattering in the MiniBooNE and T2K experiments
• Quasielastic and multinucleon excitations in antineutrino-nucleus interactions
• First Observation of Coherent ${\pi }^0$ Production in Neutrino Nucleus Interactions with $E_{\nu }<$ 2 GeV
• Measurement of Coherent Production of ${\pi }^{\pm }$ in Neutrino and Anti-Neutrino Beams on Carbon from $E_{\nu }$ of $1.5$ to $20$ GeV
• Measurement of Neutrino Flux from Neutrino-Electron Elastic Scattering
• Measurement of the Inclusive Electron Neutrino Charged Current Cross Section on Carbon with the T2K Near Detector