Single-photon production in neutrino-hadron interactions at high energies

Abstract

Distinct approaches for the treatment of single-photon production in neutrino neutral-current interactions with hadrons at low and intermediate energies have been proposed over the last decades, mainly motivated by the fact that this process is one of the main backgrounds in ${\ensuremath{\nu}}_{\ensuremath{\mu}}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}{\ensuremath{\nu}}_{e}$ oscillation experiments. Such approaches disregard the contribution of the Pomeron ($\mathbb{P}$) exchange, which becomes dominant at high energies. In this paper, the dipole formalism is extended for the exclusive photon production in the ${Z}^{0}$-proton interactions at high energies and the contribution associated with the Pomeron exchange is estimated. Results for the squared transverse momentum distribution and total cross section are presented considering different models for the dipole-proton scattering amplitude, which imply a steep increase of the cross section with the energy.