First evidence of coherent $K^{+}$ meson production in neutrino-nucleus scattering

Abstract

Neutrino-induced charged-current coherent kaon production, ${\nu }_{\mu }A\to {\mu }^{-}{K}^{+}A$, is a rare, inelastic electroweak process that brings a $K^{+}$ on shell and leaves the target nucleus intact in its ground state. This process is significantly lower in rate than neutrino-induced charged-current coherent pion production, because of Cabibbo suppression and a kinematic suppression due to the larger kaon mass. We search for such events in the scintillator tracker of MINERvA by observing the final state $K^{+}$, ${\mu }^{-}$ and no other detector activity, and by using the kinematics of the final state particles to reconstruct the small momentum transfer to the nucleus, which is a model-independent characteristic of coherent scattering. We find the first experimental evidence for the process at $3\sigma$ significance.

arXiv commentadded ancillary file with information about the six kaon candidates

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• NuSTEC White Paper: Status and Challenges of Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering
• Progress in measurements of 0.1--10 GeV neutrino-nucleus scattering and anticipated results from future experiments
• Exploring Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions in the GeV Regime using MINERvA
• Measurements of the ${\nu }_{\mu }$ and ${\bar{\nu }}_{\mu }$-induced Coherent Charged Pion Production Cross Sections on ${}^{12}C$ by the T2K experiment