Neutral current coherent pion production

TL;DR

This paper models neutrino-induced coherent pion production at low and intermediate energies, highlighting the dominance of Delta excitation and the sensitivity of results to axial form factors, with implications for neutrino and antineutrino interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive model including hadronic degrees of freedom and nuclear effects, emphasizing the impact of axial form factors on production cross sections.

Findings

Delta excitation dominates due to background cancellations.

Results are highly sensitive to the axial coupling C5A(0).

Differences between neutrino and antineutrino cross sections are analyzed.

Abstract

We investigate the neutrino induced coherent pion production reaction at low and intermediate energies. The model includes pion, nucleon and Delta(1232) resonance as the relevant hadronic degrees of freedom. Nuclear medium effects on the production mechanisms and pion distortion are taken into account. We obtain that the dominance of the Delta excitation holds due to large cancellations among the background contributions. We consider two sets of vector and axial-vector N-Delta transition form-factors, evidencing the strong sensitivity of the results to the axial coupling C5A(0). The differences between neutrino and antineutrino cross sections, emerging from interference terms, are also discussed.