Nuclear effects in neutrino-nucleus DIS

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current understanding of nuclear modifications in neutrino-nucleus deep inelastic scattering, highlighting discrepancies between different experimental data and implications for neutrino physics.

Contribution

It discusses the inconsistencies in nuclear effects observed in neutrino versus charged-lepton scattering and explores their impact on neutrino oscillation experiments and fundamental physics.

Findings

Inconsistencies between charged-lepton and neutrino scattering nuclear modifications.

Nuclear effects may contribute to the NuTeV anomaly.

Nuclear medium effects influence neutrino-oscillation measurements.

Abstract

We explain the current status of nuclear parton distribution functions in connection with neutrino-nucleus interactions. Neutrino deep inelastic scattering (DIS) measurements have been done for heavy nuclear targets such as iron and lead. In order to extract structure functions of the nucleon, one needs to remove nuclear effects from the data. However, recent studies indicate that there are inconsistencies in nuclear modifications between charged-lepton and neutrino scattering measurements. Nuclear medium effects could be also an origin for the NuTeV anomaly in the weak-mixing angle. In addition, the modifications could affect neutrino-oscillation experiments because some DIS events of neutrino-oxygen nucleus interactions are contained. On the other hand, the nuclear medium effects themselves are interesting and important for describing nuclei in terms of quark and gluon degrees of freedom.