Confronting electron- and neutrino-nucleus scattering

TL;DR

This paper discusses the challenges in modeling neutrino-nucleus scattering, highlighting differences from electron scattering and proposing systematic electron data analysis to better understand neutrino interactions.

Contribution

It emphasizes the limitations of current models in explaining neutrino-nucleus cross sections and advocates for systematic electron scattering data analysis to identify contributing processes.

Findings

Electron scattering models fail to fully explain neutrino scattering data.

Flux averaging complicates the identification of dominant reaction mechanisms.

Systematic electron data analysis can help clarify contributing nuclear processes.

Abstract

The analysis of the sample of charged current quasi elastic events collected by the MiniBooNE Collaboration suggests that the scheme successfully employed to describe electron-nucleus scattering fails to explain neutrino-nucleus cross sections. I argue that, due to flux average, the double differential neutrino-nucleus cross section does not allow for a clearcut determination of the dominant reaction mechanism. A systematic study of the large body of electron scattering data may help to identify the processes, other than single nucleon knockout, contributing to the observed neutrino cross section.