Discrimination of parametrizations for nuclear effects in neutrino scattering through comparisons of low ($\sim 700\mathrm{MeV}$) and medium ($\sim 3\mathrm{GeV}$) energy cross-section data

High-quality charged current quasielastic scattering data have recently been reported for both muon neutrinos and antineutrinos from several accelerator-based neutrino experiments. Measurements from MiniBooNE were the first to indicate that more complex nuclear effects, now thought to be the result of nucleon pair correlations, may contribute to neutrino quasielastic samples at a much higher significance than previously assumed. These findings are now being tested by $\mathrm{MINER}\nu \mathrm{A}$ and other contemporary neutrino experiments. Presented here is a comparison of data from MiniBooNE and $\mathrm{MINER}\nu \mathrm{A}$ to a few example parametrizations of these nuclear effects. It has been demonstrated that such effects may bias future measurements of neutrino oscillation parameters, and so this issue continues to press the neutrino community. A comparison of data over a large range of neutrino energies is one approach to exploring the extent to which such nucleon correlations may influence our understanding and subsequent modeling of neutrino quasielastic scattering.

Figure 1

The shape (a) and scale (b) of ${\nu }_{\mu }$ MiniBooNE $Q_{QE}^2$ data compared to parametrizations of the RFG presented in the same form as $\mathrm{MINER}\nu \mathrm{A}$ data in recent publications [10, 11, 13]. Appropriate to each comparison, shape-only uncertainties accompany the data in (a), while total uncertainties are shown in (b). Within these experimental uncertainties, in the MiniBooNE energy range the effect of treating nuclear effects with an increase in the axial mass is largely consistent with the TEM description both in shape and in scale. Note that Pauli blocking has not been tuned in the models shown here, and so the agreement in the low $Q_{QE}^2$ region is somewhat worse compared to the tuned distributions shown in Refs. [3] and [4].

Figure 2

The same distributions described in Fig. 1, but for ${\overline{\nu }}_{\mu }$. Note that, as is also the case for ${\nu }_{\mu }$, the ${\overline{\nu }}_{\mu }$ data appears simultaneously consistent with an increase in the axial mass and the introduction of the TEM.