A Precise Determination of (Anti)neutrino Fluxes with (Anti)neutrino-Hydrogen Interactions

Abstract

We present a novel method to accurately determine the flux of neutrinos and antineutrinos, one of the dominant systematic uncertainty affecting current and future long-baseline neutrino experiments, as well as precision neutrino scattering experiment. Using exclusive topologies in $\nu (\bar{\nu })$-hydrogen interactions, ${\nu }_{\mu }p\to {\mu }^{-}p{\pi }^{+}$, ${\bar{\nu }}_{\mu }p\to {\mu }^{+}p{\pi }^{-}$, and ${\bar{\nu }}_{\mu }p\to {\mu }^{+}n$ with small hadronic energy, we achieve an overall accuracy on the relative fluxes better than 1\% in the energy range covering most of the available flux. Since we cannot rely on simulations nor model corrections at this level of precision, we present techniques to constrain all relevant systematic uncertainties using data themselves. The method can be implemented using the approach we recently proposed to collect high statistics samples of $\nu (\bar{\nu })$-hydrogen interactions in a low-density and high-resolution detector, which could serve as part of the near detector complex in a long-baseline neutrino experiment, as well as a dedicated beam monitoring detector.

Final version published in PLB (15 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables)

References in corpus (4)

• A Precise Measurement of the Muon Neutrino-Nucleon Inclusive Charged Current Cross-Section off an Isoscalar Target in the Energy Range 2.5 < E_ν< 40 GeV by NOMAD
• Neutrino inclusive inelastic scattering off nuclei
• Nuclear parton distributions and the Drell-Yan process
• Neutrino-induced one-pion production revisited: the ${\nu }_{\mu }n\to {\mu }^{-}n{\pi }^{+}$ channel

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Probing nuclear effects with neutrino-induced charged-current neutral pion production
• First T2K measurement of transverse kinematic imbalance in the muon-neutrino charged-current single-${\pi }^{+}$ production channel containing at least one proton
• Neutrino-hydrogen interactions with a high-pressure time projection chamber
• Probing Free Nucleons with (Anti)neutrinos
• A substandard candle: the low-$\nu$ method at few-GeV neutrino energies
• Precision Measurements of Fundamental Interactions with (Anti)Neutrinos
• Constraining nuclear effects in Argon using machine learning algorithms
• Neutrino Induced Charged Current Coherent Pion Production for Constraining the Muon Neutrino Flux at DUNE
• A New Generation of Neutrino Cross Section Experiments: Challenges and Opportunities
• Enhancing the LBNF Physics Programs With A high-resolution Magnetized Detector
• Nucleon axial-vector form factor and radius from future neutrino experiments