The impact of neutrino-nucleus interaction modeling on new physics searches

Abstract

Accurate neutrino-nucleus interaction modeling is an essential requirement for the success of the accelerator-based neutrino program. As no satisfactory description of cross sections exists, experiments tune neutrino-nucleus interactions to data to mitigate mis-modeling. In this work, we study how the interplay between near detector tuning and cross section mis-modeling affects new physics searches. We perform a realistic simulation of neutrino events and closely follow NOvA's tuning, the first published of such procedures in a neutrino experiment. We analyze two illustrative new physics scenarios, sterile neutrinos and light neutrinophilic scalars, presenting the relevant experimental signatures and the sensitivity regions with and without tuning. While the tuning does not wash out sterile neutrino oscillation patterns, cross section mis-modeling can bias the experimental sensitivity. In the case of light neutrinophilic scalars, variations in cross section models completely dominate the sensitivity regardless of any tuning. Our findings reveal the critical need to improve our theoretical understanding of neutrino-nucleus interactions, and to estimate the impact of tuning on new physics searches. We urge neutrino experiments to follow NOvA's example and publish the details of their tuning procedure, and to develop strategies to more robustly account for cross section uncertainties, which will expand the scope of their physics program.

References in corpus (11)

• The Reactor Antineutrino Anomaly
• Statistical Significance of the Gallium Anomaly
• Results from the Baksan Experiment on Sterile Transitions (BEST)
• Light dark matter in neutrino beams: production modelling and scattering signatures at MiniBooNE, T2K and SHiP
• Leptophobic Dark Matter at Neutrino Factories
• Signatures of sub-GeV dark matter beams at neutrino experiments
• Mono-Neutrino at DUNE: New Signals From Neutrinophilic Thermal Dark Matter
• GeV-scale dark matter: production at the Main Injector
• Search for sterile neutrino oscillation using RENO and NEOS data
• QED radiative corrections for accelerator neutrinos
• Assessing the accuracy of the GENIE event generator with electron-scattering data

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Dipole portal and neutrinophilic scalars at DUNE revisited: the importance of the high-energy neutrino tail
• Measuring Oscillations with A Million Atmospheric Neutrinos
• First measurement of $\eta$ production in neutrino interactions on argon with MicroBooNE
• Contrastive Learning for Robust Representations of Neutrino Data
• Sampling Off-Axis Neutrino Fluxes with the Short-Baseline Near Detector