Abstract
MINERvA reports inclusive charged-current cross sections for muon neutrinos on hydrocarbon in the NuMI beamline. We measured the double-differential cross section in terms of the longitudinal and transverse muon momenta, as well as the single-differential cross sections in those variables. The data used in this analysis correspond to an exposure of $3.34 \times 10^{20}$ protons on target with a peak neutrino energy of approximately 3.5 GeV. Measurements are compared to the GENIE, NuWro and GiBUU neutrino cross-section predictions, as well as a version of GENIE modified to produce better agreement with prior exclusive MINERvA measurements. None of the models or variants were able to successfully reproduce the data across the entire phase space, which includes areas dominated by each interaction channel.
Highlights
Precision neutrino oscillation measurements rely on accurate nuclear interaction models to estimate certain systematic uncertainties which can be a significant component of the total systematic uncertainty [1,2]
Muon track reconstruction requires the muon to originate in the fiducial volume, traverse the remainder of the MINERvA detector and leave a track in the MINOS near detector, which is matched with a MINERvA track
Baryon singlepion resonance production and other CC events make up the remainder of the signal sample, while neutral-current events and charged-current events originating from other flavor neutrinos or any flavor of antineutrinos comprise the background events for this analysis
Summary
Precision neutrino oscillation measurements rely on accurate nuclear interaction models to estimate certain systematic uncertainties which can be a significant component of the total systematic uncertainty [1,2]. Precise measurements of the inclusive CC neutrino cross section (including all interaction channels, with the only the presence of a charged lepton required) in the sub-GeV to multi-GeV regime of Eν illuminate the interplay of quasielastic (QE) scattering, baryon resonance production (RES) and deep inelastic scattering (DIS). This interplay involves aspects of neutrino-nucleus scattering and nuclear modeling which are not well understood; its exploration is of current interest. These measurements have reduced MINERvA’s average flux uncertainty to 7% [17]
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