Electroweak interactions with the nucleon and tests of the standard model

Abstract

Electroweak single-nucleon elastic scattering processes at all energies are calculated, motivated in part by possible future low and intermediate energy experiments with intense neutrino beams. We discuss means to extract nucleon form factors from a complete set of experiments. The goal is to provide model-independent tests of the standard model in the confinement regime of hadronic structure. This includes tests of the conserved vector current theorem, the presence of second-class currents, and the form of the weak neutral current. As a guide for future experiments, numerical calculations for charge-changing neutrino processes are presented using empirical form factors. Interesting low-energy (≈500 MeV) structure is found in cross sections and final lepton polarizations.