Measurement of neutrino-oxygen neutral-current quasi-elastic cross section using atmospheric neutrinos at Super-Kamiokande

Abstract

Neutral current (NC) interactions of atmospheric neutrinos on oxygen form one of the major backgrounds in the search for supernova relic neutrinos with water-based Cherenkov detectors. The NC channel is dominated by neutrino quasi-elastic (NCQE) scattering off nucleons inside ${}^{16}$O nuclei. In this paper we report the first measurement of NCQE cross section using atmospheric neutrinos at Super-Kamiokande (SK). The measurement used 2,778 live days of SK-IV data with a fiducial volume of 22.5 kiloton water. Within the visible energy window of 7.5-29.5 MeV, we observed $117$ events compared to the expected $71.9$ NCQE signal and $53.1$ background events. Weighted by the atmospheric neutrino spectrum from 160 MeV to 10 GeV, the flux averaged NCQE cross section is measured to be $(1.01\pm 0.17(\text{stat.}{)}_{-0.30}^{+0.78}(\text{sys.}))\times 10^{-38}$ cm${}^2$.

11 pages, 9 figures, submitted to PRD

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background Search at Super-Kamiokande
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• Measurement of neutrino and antineutrino neutral-current quasielastic-like interactions on oxygen by detecting nuclear de-excitation $\gamma$-rays
• Evidence of Antineutrinos from Distant Reactors using Pure Water at SNO+
• Neutral-current background induced by atmospheric neutrinos at large liquid-scintillator detectors: II. Methodology for in situ measurements
• Diffuse Neutrino Flux Based on the Rates of Core-collapse Supernovae and Black Hole Formation Deduced from a Novel Galactic Chemical Evolution Model
• First Detailed Calculation of Atmospheric Neutrino Foregrounds to the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background in Super-Kamiokande
• Implementation and investigation of electron-nucleus scattering in the \textsc{NEUT} neutrino event generator
• Exploring Four Fermion Contact Couplings of a Dark Fermion and an Electron at Hadron Colliders and Direct Detection Experiments
• Measurement of $\gamma$-rays generated by neutron interaction with ${}^{16}$O at 30 MeV and 250 MeV
• CNNs for enhanced background discrimination in DSNB searches in large-scale water-Gd detectors