Pion Production in Neutrino-Nucleon Reactions

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive model for weak pion production in neutrino-nucleon interactions, incorporating resonance excitation, background terms from chiral symmetry, and interference effects, with implications for cross section predictions.

Contribution

It introduces a model that combines resonance excitation with chiral symmetry background terms and refines the axial form factor based on experimental data, revealing a smaller Delta contribution than previously assumed.

Findings

Smaller Delta resonance contribution than traditional models.

Interference effects lead to parity-violating angular distributions.

Refined axial form factor $C_5^A(q^2)$ based on ANL data.

Abstract

We construct a model for the weak pion production off the nucleon, which in addition to the weak excitation of the $\Delta(1232)$ resonance and its subsequent decay into $N\pi$, it includes also some background terms required by chiral symmetry. We re-fit the $C_5^A(q^2)$ form factor to the flux averaged $\nu_\mu p \to \mu^-p\pi^+$ ANL $q^2-$differential cross section data, finding a substantially smaller contribution of the $\Delta$ pole mechanism than traditionally assumed in the literature. We also show that the interference between the Delta pole and the background terms produces parity-violating contributions to the pion angular differential cross section.