Meson-exchange currents and quasielastic antineutrino cross sections in the SuperScaling Approximation

TL;DR

This paper models quasielastic antineutrino cross sections using superscaling and assesses the significant role of meson-exchange currents, especially in charge-changing reactions, enhancing understanding of nuclear responses.

Contribution

It introduces a phenomenological model based on electron scattering data to evaluate antineutrino cross sections and estimates meson-exchange current effects in the 2p-2h sector.

Findings

Meson-exchange currents have a larger impact on antineutrino than neutrino reactions.

The model successfully reproduces quasielastic cross sections using superscaling.

Meson-exchange currents significantly contribute to charge-changing antineutrino interactions.

Abstract

We evaluate quasielastic double-differential antineutrino cross sections obtained in a phenomenological model based on the superscaling behavior of electron scattering data and estimate the contribution of the vector meson-exchange currents in the 2p-2h sector. We show that the impact of meson-exchange currents for charge-changing antineutrino reactions is much larger than in the neutrino case.