Unexpected nuclear effects in v-Fe interactions and MINERvA's program to measure v scattering off a range of nuclei

Abstract

Recent studies of nuclear effects in v -Fe data by members of the CTEQ collaboration suggest that nuclear effects as seen by neutrinos are very different compared to those from μ/e-Fe scattering. The CTEQ analysis extracted a set of iron PDFs and showed that under reasonable assumptions it is possible to constrain the valence, light sea, and strange quark distributions. The CTEQ iron PDFs were then used to compute xBj -dependent and Q2 -dependent nuclear correction factors for iron structure functions, which are required in global analyses of free nucleon PDFs. Comparing these results with nuclear correction factors from neutrino-nucleus scattering models and correction factors for μ/e-Fe scattering, CTEQ found that, except for very high xBj, the correction factors differ in both shape and magnitude from the correction factors of the models and charged-lepton scattering.The MINERvA experiment will measure v -A scattering off of He, C, Fe and Pb to systematically study these nuclear effects in neutrino interactions with high statistics. The poster will summarize the CTEQ results and outline the MINERvA program for measuring nuclear effects.