Extracting the Weinberg angle at intermediate energies

Abstract

A recent experiment by the NuTeV collaboration resulted in a surprisingly high value for the weak mixing angle sin 2 θ W . The Paschos–Wolfenstein relation, relating neutrino cross sections to the Weinberg angle, is of pivotal importance in the NuTeV analysis. In this work, we investigate the sensitivity of the Paschos–Wolfenstein relation to nuclear structure aspects at neutrino energies in the few GeV range. Neutrino–nucleus cross sections are calculated for 16O and 56Fe target nuclei within a relativistic quasi-elastic nucleon-knockout model.