Quasi-elastic neutrino charged-current scattering cross sections on oxygen

TL;DR

This paper calculates quasi-elastic neutrino-oxygen scattering cross sections using a relativistic model, revealing significant differences from the traditional Fermi gas model and emphasizing nuclear-model dependence.

Contribution

It introduces a relativistic distorted-wave impulse approximation approach for neutrino-oxygen scattering, improving accuracy over the widely used Fermi gas model.

Findings

Relativistic model aligns well with electron scattering data.

Fermi gas model overestimates cross sections.

Nuclear-model dependence is significant around 1 GeV.

Abstract

The charged-current quasi-elastic scattering of muon neutrinos on oxygen target is computed for neutrino energies between 200 MeV and 2.5 GeV using the relativistic distorted-wave impulse approximation with relativistic optical potential, which was earlier successfully applied to describe electron-nucleus data. We study both neutrino and electron processes and show that the reduced exclusive cross sections for neutrino and electron scattering are similar. The comparison with the relativistic Fermi gas model (RFGM), which is widely used in data analyses of neutrino experiments, shows that the RFGM fails completely when applied to exclusive cross section data and leads to overestimated values of inclusive and total cross sections. We also found significant nuclear-model dependence of exclusive, inclusive and total cross sections for about 1 GeV energy.