On Impact of Nuclear Effects on Weak Pion Production in Sub 1 GeV Energy Region

TL;DR

This paper investigates how nuclear effects and in-medium modifications influence charged-current single pion production in neutrino interactions with carbon nuclei below 1 GeV, improving theoretical models for better accuracy.

Contribution

It develops a refined model of neutrino-induced pion production by performing exact integrations, accounting for nuclear effects and nonresonant backgrounds, enhancing previous approaches.

Findings

Nuclear effects significantly alter pion production cross sections.

Exact integration impacts both differential and total cross sections.

The fraction of Delta decays into npnh states varies with neutrino energy.

Abstract

Charged-current single pion production in scattering off 12C is investigated for neutrino energies up to 1 GeV. An impact of nuclear effects with in-medium modifications of the Delta(1232) resonance properties as well as an effective field theory nonresonant background contribution are discussed. Dependence of the fraction of Delta(1232) decays into npnh states on incident neutrino energy is estimated. A model of Nieves et al. [1] is further developed by performing exact integration avoiding several approximations. The effect of exact integration is investigated both for double-differential and total neutrino-nucleus cross sections.