Abstract
We present measurements of the neutrino and antineutrino total charged-current cross sections on carbon and their ratio using the MINERvA scintillator-tracker. The measurements span the energy range 2-22 GeV and were performed using forward and reversed horn focusing modes of the Fermilab low-energy NuMI beam to obtain large neutrino and antineutrino samples. The flux is obtained using a sub-sample of charged-current events at low hadronic energy transfer along with precise higher energy external neutrino cross section data overlapping with our energy range between 12-22 GeV. We also report on the antineutrino-neutrino cross section ratio, Rcc, which does not rely on external normalization information. Our ratio measurement, obtained within the same experiment using the same technique, benefits from the cancellation of common sample systematic uncertainties and reaches a precision of 5% at low energy. Our results for the antineutrino-nucleus scattering cross section and for Rcc are the most precise to date in the energy range $E_{\nu} <$ 6GeV.
Highlights
Long-baseline oscillation experiments [1] [2], which aim to precisely measure neutrino oscillation parameters and constrain CP violation, will make use of neutrino and antineutrino beams in the few-GeV neutrino energy (Eν) range
We report on the antineutrino-neutrino cross section ratio, RCC, which does not rely on external normalization information
The difference is taken as the wrongsign contamination uncertainty, which is less than 0.5% (0.2%) for the extracted antineutrino cross section
Summary
Long-baseline oscillation experiments [1] [2], which aim to precisely measure neutrino oscillation parameters and constrain CP violation, will make use of neutrino and antineutrino beams in the few-GeV neutrino energy (Eν) range. Uncertainties in poorly constrained cross section components in this energy range produce further competing shape effects on the measured visible energy spectra used to extract the oscillation probabilities. Utilizing beams of both neutrinos and antineutrinos allows a measurement of the CP asymmetry [3], ACP , defined as, ACP. We improve on the precision of both the antineutrino cross section and RCC (by nearly a factor of four) at low energies (2-6 GeV). The current work provides a precise measurement of the ratio, RCC , as well as the measured model-independent rates for re-extracting cross sections with alternative generator-level models. The antineutrino flux normalization method employed here improves the antineutrino cross section precision by a factor of 1.51.9, which for the previous result was dominated by the large uncertainty (∼10%) on the model-based antineutrino normalization constraint
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