Longitudinal kinematic imbalances in neutrino and antineutrino interactions for improved measurements of neutrino energy and the axial vector form factor

Abstract

Current and future accelerator neutrino oscillation experiments require an improved understanding of nuclear effects in neutrino-nucleus interactions. One important systematic uncertainty is introduced by the collective impact of nuclear effects which bias the reconstruction of the neutrino energy, such as the nuclear removal energy. In this manuscript, we introduce a novel observable for accelerator neutrino oscillation experiments, the visible longitudinal momentum imbalance, reconstructed in charged current quasi-elastic interactions from the outgoing charged lepton and nucleon. We demonstrate it to be minimally dependent on the neutrino energy and sensitive to sources of bias in neutrino energy reconstruction. Furthermore, we show how the use of the longitudinal imbalance in antineutrino interactions in a target containing hydrogen allows for an improved, high-purity selection of the interactions on hydrogen. This approach offers the potential for precise measurements of the nuclear axial vector form factor as well as of the antineutrino flux.

10 pages, 10 figures; version accepted for publication in Physical Review D

References in corpus (12)

• The T2K Neutrino Flux Prediction
• Inclusive quasi-elastic electron-nucleus scattering
• An Improved Measurement of Neutrino Oscillation Parameters by the NOvA Experiment
• Measurements of neutrino oscillation parameters from the T2K experiment using $3.6\times 10^{21}$ protons on target
• The NEUT Neutrino Interaction Simulation
• Improved constraints on neutrino mixing from the T2K experiment with $3.13\times 10^{21}$ protons on target
• Improving the accuracy of neutrino energy reconstruction in charged-current quasielastic scattering off nuclear targets
• Final state interactions in semi-inclusive neutrino-nucleus scattering: Application to T2K and MINER$\nu$A experiments
• Sensitivity of the Upgraded T2K Near Detector to constrain neutrino and anti-neutrino interactions with no mesons in the final state by exploiting nucleon-lepton correlations
• Study of final-state interactions of protons in neutrino-nucleus scattering with INCL and NuWro cascade models
• Parametrized uncertainties in the spectral function model of neutrino charged-current quasielastic interactions for oscillation analyses
• Neutron detection and application with a novel 3D-projection scintillator tracker in the future long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Benchmarking neutrino interaction models via a comparative analysis of kinematic imbalance measurements from the T2K, MicroBooNE and MINERvA experiments
• Centre-of-momentum frame analysis of $\eta$ production in DUNE