The nucleon axial mass and the MiniBooNE CCQE neutrino-nucleus data

TL;DR

This paper uses a successful nuclear reaction model to analyze MiniBooNE CCQE neutrino data, showing that multinucleon effects are crucial and that the nucleon axial mass aligns with previous measurements, challenging earlier claims of anomalously high values.

Contribution

It demonstrates the importance of RPA and multinucleon knockout in explaining MiniBooNE data and provides a nucleon axial mass consistent with prior determinations, questioning previous anomalous results.

Findings

RPA and multinucleon knockout are essential for data description.

Nucleon axial mass M_A = 1.08 ± 0.03 GeV aligns with previous results.

Reconstruction of neutrino energy from muon kinematics may be unreliable due to multinucleon effects.

Abstract

We analyze the MiniBooNE CCQE $d\sigma/dT_\mu d\cos\theta_\mu$ data using a theoretical model that has proved to be quite successful in the analysis of nuclear reactions with electron, photon and pion probes. We find that RPA and multinucleon knockout turn out to be essential for the description of the MiniBooNE data. We show these measurements are fully compatible with former determinations of nucleon axial mass $M_A$, in contrast with several previous analyses, which have suggested an anomalously large value. We find, $M_A=1.08 \pm 0.03$ GeV. We also argue that the procedure, commonly used to reconstruct the neutrino energy for QE events from the muon angle and energy, could be unreliable for a wide region of the phase space, due to the large importance of multinucleon events.