Energy reconstruction effects in neutrino oscillation experiments and implications for the analysis

TL;DR

This paper discusses how energy reconstruction effects, especially multinucleon interactions, influence neutrino oscillation data analysis and proposes corrections that impact the inferred oscillation parameters.

Contribution

It introduces a correction method for energy reconstruction effects in neutrino experiments, improving the accuracy of oscillation parameter estimation.

Findings

Corrections cause events to shift towards lower reconstructed energies.

Applying corrections increases the best-fit oscillation mass parameters.

Corrections improve compatibility of MiniBooNE data with other constraints.

Abstract

Data on neutrino oscillation often involve reconstructed neutrino energies while the analysis implies the real neutrino energy. The corrections corresponding to the transformation from real to reconstructed energy are discussed in the case of Cherenkov detectors where multinucleon events appear as quasielastic ones. These corrections show up as a tendency for the events to escape the region of high flux, with a clear preference for the low energy side. This is an effect of the multinucleon component of the quasielastic cross section. We have applied our corrections to the T2K and MiniBooNE data for electron appearance or $\nu_\mu$ disappearance data. We show that the inclusion of this correction in the analysis is expected to lead to an increase of the best fit oscillation mass parameters, particularly pronounced for the MiniBooNE neutrino data. This inclusion in the analysis of the MiniBooNE neutrino data should improve the compatibility with the existing constraints.