Measurement of inclusive charged current interactions on carbon in a few-GeV neutrino beam

TL;DR

This paper presents the first measurement of inclusive charged current muon neutrino interactions on carbon at around 1 GeV, providing precise cross section data to improve neutrino interaction models.

Contribution

It provides the first measurement of CC inclusive cross sections on carbon at ~1 GeV, with detailed comparison to simulation models NEUT and NUANCE.

Findings

Measured interaction rates with 6-15% precision

Extracted cross sections with 8-30% precision

First CC inclusive cross section measurement on carbon at this energy

Abstract

The SciBooNE Collaboration reports a measurement of inclusive charged current interactions of muon neutrinos on carbon with an average energy of 0.8 GeV using the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Beam. We compare our measurement with two neutrino interaction simulations: NEUT and NUANCE. The charged current interaction rates (product of flux and cross section) are extracted by fitting the muon kinematics, with a precision of 6-15% for the energy dependent and 3% for the energy integrated analyses. We also extract CC inclusive interaction cross sections from the observed rates, with a precision of 10-30% for the energy dependent and 8% for the energy integrated analyses. This is the first measurement of the CC inclusive cross section on carbon around 1 GeV. These results can be used to convert previous SciBooNE cross section ratio measurements to absolute cross section values.