Simultaneous measurement of muon neutrino ${\nu }_{\mu }$ charged-current single ${\pi }^{+}$ production in CH, C, H${}_2$O, Fe, and Pb targets in MINERvA

Abstract

Neutrino-induced charged-current single ${\pi }^{+}$ production in the $\Delta (1232)$ resonance region is of considerable interest to accelerator-based neutrino oscillation experiments. In this work, high statistics differential cross sections are reported for the semi-exclusive reaction ${\nu }_{\mu }A\to {\mu }^{-}{\pi }^{+}+$ nucleon(s) on scintillator, carbon, water, iron, and lead targets recorded by MINERvA using a wide-band ${\nu }_{\mu }$ beam with $⟨E_{\nu }⟩\approx 6$~GeV. Suppression of the cross section at low $Q^2$ and enhancement of low $T_{\pi }$ are observed in both light and heavy nuclear targets compared to phenomenological models used in current neutrino interaction generators. The cross-section ratios for iron and lead compared to CH across the kinematic variables probed are 0.8 and 0.5 respectively, a scaling which is also not predicted by current generators.

6 pages, 6 figures, 117 pages of supplementary material; updated to accepted version and added ancillary files with cross section data; updated again to add ancillary files with neutrino flux used for result

References in corpus (5)

• Measurement of Neutrino-Induced Charged-Current Charged Pion Production Cross Sections on Mineral Oil at E${}_{\nu }\sim 1\text{GeV}$
• PCAC and the Deficit of Forward Muons in pi^+ Production by Neutrinos
• Study of quasielastic scattering using charged-current nu_mu-iron interactions in the MINOS Near Detector
• Improved constraint on the MINERvA medium energy neutrino flux using $\bar{\nu }{e}^{-}\to \bar{\nu }{e}^{-}$ data
• Constraining the NuMI neutrino flux using inverse muon decay reactions in MINERvA

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Inclusive cross section measurements in final states with and without protons for charged-current ${\nu }_{\mu }$-Ar scattering in MicroBooNE
• Neutrino-induced coherent ${\pi }^{+}$ production in C, CH, Fe and Pb at $⟨E_{\nu }⟩\sim 6$ GeV
• Measurement of single charged pion production in charged-current ${\nu }_{\mu }$-Ar interactions with the MicroBooNE detector