Probing nuclear effects with neutrino-induced charged-current neutral pion production

Abstract

We study neutrino-induced charged-current (CC) ${\pi }^0$ production on carbon nuclei using events with fully imaged final-state proton-${\pi }^0$ systems. Novel use of final-state correlations based on transverse kinematic imbalance enable the first measurements of the struck nucleon's Fermi motion, of the intranuclear momentum transfer (IMT) dynamics, and of the final-state hadronic momentum configuration in neutrino pion production. Event distributions are presented for i) the momenta of neutrino-struck neutrons below the Fermi surface, ii) the direction of missing transverse momentum characterizing the strength of IMT, and iii) proton-pion momentum imbalance with respect to the lepton scattering plane. The observed Fermi motion and IMT strength are compared to the previous MINERvA measurement of neutrino CC quasielastic-like production. The measured shapes and absolute rates of these distributions, as well as the cross-section asymmetries show tensions with predictions from current neutrino generator models.

9 pages, 8 figures. v3: PRD-accepted version, with full package of supplemental materials; v4: added 2 missing references; v5: corrected typo in Eq. 8

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Cited by in corpus (15)

• First T2K measurement of transverse kinematic imbalance in the muon-neutrino charged-current single-${\pi }^{+}$ production channel containing at least one proton
• Exploring Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions in the GeV Regime using MINERvA
• Measurement of ${\nu }_{\mu }$ Charged-Current Inclusive ${\pi }^0$ Production in the NOvA Near Detector
• Measuring Oscillations with A Million Atmospheric Neutrinos
• Simultaneous measurement of muon neutrino quasielastic-like cross sections on CH, C, water, Fe, and Pb as a function of muon kinematics at MINERvA
• Benchmarking neutrino interaction models via a comparative analysis of kinematic imbalance measurements from the T2K, MicroBooNE and MINERvA experiments
• Improving target neutron momentum reconstruction using MINER$\nu$A ${\pi }^0$ data
• Hypothesis tests and model parameter estimation on data sets with missing correlation information
• Measurement of the A dependence of the muon neutrino charged-current quasielastic-like cross section as a function of muon and proton kinematics at $<$E${}_{\nu }>\sim$6 GeV
• Towards a Unified Model of Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions
• Measurement of the differential cross section for neutral pion production in charged-current muon neutrino interactions on argon with the MicroBooNE detector
• Sampling Off-Axis Neutrino Fluxes with the Short-Baseline Near Detector
• Measurement of inclusive charged-current ${\nu }_{\mu }$ cross sections as a function of muon kinematics at $<E_{\nu }>\sim 6GeV$ on hydrocarbon
• Neutral pion reconstruction using machine learning in the MINERvA experiment at $⟨E_{\nu }⟩\sim 6$ GeV
• Unraveling the Flux-Averaged Neutrino-Nucleus Cross Section