Measurement of Neutral Current Neutral Pion Production on Carbon in a Few-GeV Neutrino Beam

Abstract

Understanding of the π0 production via neutrino-nucleus neutral current interaction in the neutrino energy region of a few GeV is essential for the neutrino oscillation experiments. In this thesis, we present a study of neutral current π0 production from muon neutrinos scattering on a polystyrene (C8H8) target in the SciBooNE experiment. All neutrino beam data corresponding to 0.99 × 1020 protons on target have been analyzed. We have measured the cross section ratio of the neutral current π0 production to the total charge current interaction and the π0 kinematic distribution such as momentum and direction. We obtain [7.7 ± 0.5(stat.) ± 0.5(sys.)] × 10-2 as the ratio of the neutral current neutral pion production to total charged current cross section; the mean energy of neutrinos producing detected neutral pions is 1.1 GeV. The result agrees with the Rein- Sehgal model, which is generally used for the Monte Carlo simulation by many neutrino oscillation experiments. We achieve less than 10 % uncertainty which is required for the next generation search for νµ → νe oscillation. The spectrum shape of the π0 momentum and the distribution of the π0 emitted angle agree with the prediction, which means that not only the Rein-Sehgal model but also the intra-nuclear interaction models describe our data well. We also measure the ratio of the neutral current coherent pion production to total charged current cross section to be (1.17 ± 0.23 ) × 10-2 based on the Rein and Sehgal model. The result gives the evidence for non-zero coherent pion production via neutral current interaction at the mean neutrino energy of 1.0 GeV.