Elastic hadron-nucleus scattering in neutrino-nucleus reactions and transverse kinematics measurements

Abstract

Rescattering following a neutrino-nucleus reaction changes the number, energy, and direction of detectable hadrons. In turn, this affects the selection and kinematic distributions of subsamples of neutrino events used for interaction or oscillation analysis. This technical note focuses on three forms of two-body rescattering. Elastic hadron+nucleus scattering primarily changes the direction of the hadron with very little energy transfer. Secondly, a hadron+nucleon quasi-elastic process leads to the knockout of a single struck nucleon, possibly with charge exchange between the two hadrons. Also, a pion can be absorbed leading to the ejection of two nucleons. There was an error in the code of the {\small GENIE} neutrino event generator that affects these processes. We present examples of the change with the fixed version of the scattering process, but also compare these specifically to turning off elastic scattering completely, which is similar to other neutrino event generator configurations or a potential Equick-fix to already generated samples. Three examples are taken from current topics of interest: transverse kinematics observables in quasielastic neutrino reactions, the pion angle with respect to the incoming and outgoing lepton for $\Delta$ reactions with a charged pion in the final state, and the angle between two protons in reactions with no pions present. Elastic hadron+nucleus scattering in its unfixed form makes a large distortion in distributions of transverse kinematic imbalances scattering, but only mild distortion in other observables. The distortion of the other two processes is also mild for all distributions considered. The correct form of hadron+nucleus scattering process could play a role in describing the width and center of the sharp peak in the inferred Fermi-motion of the struck nucleon or be benchmarked using (e,e'p) data.

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• Proton-Nucleus Elastic Scattering: Comparison between Phenomenological and Microscopic Optical Potentials
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• Simulation of nuclear effects in quasi elastic and resonant neutrino interactions

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Implementation of the SuSAv2-MEC 1p1h and 2p2h models in GENIE and analysis of nuclear effects in T2K measurements
• 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
• Pion-proton correlation in neutrino interactions on nuclei
• Exploring Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions in the GeV Regime using MINERvA
• Measurement of the Multi-Neutron ${\bar{\nu }}_{\mu }$ Charged Current Differential Cross Section at Low Available Energy on Hydrocarbon