Photon emission in neutral current interactions with nucleons and nuclei

TL;DR

This paper investigates photon emission from neutrino neutral current interactions with nucleons and nuclei at around 1 GeV, focusing on cross sections and nuclear effects to improve neutrino oscillation experiment accuracy.

Contribution

The study provides detailed cross section calculations including nuclear medium effects, extending previous models to better understand photon emission in neutrino interactions.

Findings

Differential and total cross sections for neutrino-nucleon scattering are computed.

Nuclear effects like Fermi motion, Pauli blocking, and in-medium Delta modifications are incorporated.

Results help reduce systematic uncertainties in neutrino oscillation measurements.

Abstract

We report on our study of photon emission induced by Enu ~ 1 GeV (anti)neutrino neutral current interactions with nucleons and nuclei. This process is an important background for nu_e appearance oscillation experiments. At the relevant energies, the reaction is dominated by the excitation of the Delta (1232) resonance but there are also non-resonant contributions that, close to threshold, are fully determined by the effective chiral Lagrangian of strong interactions. We have obtained differential and integrated cross section for the (anti)neutrino-nucleon scattering and compare them with previous results. Furthermore, we have extended the model to nuclear targets taking into account Fermi motion, Pauli blocking and the in-medium modifications of the Delta properties. This study is important in order to reduce systematic effects in neutrino oscillation experiments.