Impact of nuclear effects on the determination of the nucleon axial mass

TL;DR

This paper investigates how nuclear effects influence the extraction of the nucleon axial mass from cross section data, revealing that certain correlation effects significantly impact the results but do not account for previously reported large axial mass values.

Contribution

It applies a formalism from electron-nucleus scattering to analyze nuclear effects on axial mass determination, highlighting the importance of correlation effects beyond the relativistic Fermi gas model.

Findings

Correlation effects significantly affect the Q^2 dependence of cross sections.

Including correlation effects does not explain large axial mass values reported by experiments.

The relativistic Fermi gas model's limitations are highlighted in axial mass analysis.

Abstract

We analize the influence of nuclear effects on the determination of the nucleon axial mass from nuclear cross sections. Our work is based on a formalism widely applied to describe electron-nucleus scattering data in the impulse approximation regime. The results of numerical calculations show that correlation effects, not taken into account by the relativistic Fermi gas model, sizably affect the $Q^2$-dependence of the cross section. However, their inclusion does not appear to explain the large values of the axial mass recently reported by the K2K and MiniBooNE collaborations.