Neutrino and antineutrino quasielastic interactions with nuclei

TL;DR

This paper studies how neutrinos and antineutrinos interact with nuclei, focusing on multinucleon excitations that affect quasielastic cross sections, revealing different impacts for neutrinos and antineutrinos due to underlying nuclear correlations.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of multinucleon effects on neutrino and antineutrino quasielastic interactions, highlighting the role of tensor correlations and interference effects.

Findings

Multinucleon excitations significantly increase neutrino quasielastic cross sections.

The impact of multinucleon effects is smaller for antineutrinos due to axial-vector interference.

Tensor correlations contribute notably to the multinucleon effects.

Abstract

We investigate the interaction of neutrinos and antineutrinos with nuclei. We explore in particular the role played by the multinucleon excitations which can contaminate the quasielastic cross section. For neutrinos the multinucleon term produces a sizable increase of the quasielastic cross section. Part of the effect arises from tensor correlations. For antineutrinos this influence is smaller owing to the axial-vector interference which increases the relative importance of the terms which are not affected by these multinucleon excitations.