Recovering partial conservation of axial current in diffractive neutrino scattering

TL;DR

This paper presents a model of diffractive neutrino scattering that maintains partial conservation of the axial current, resolving previous contradictions by ensuring the hadronic current's proper conservation properties.

Contribution

The authors develop a chiral hadronic current model that preserves PCAC in diffractive neutrino scattering, correcting earlier models with non-conserved currents.

Findings

The model correctly reproduces the singularity structure of the current.

It demonstrates that previous reports of PCAC breakdown were due to non-conservation artifacts.

The approach aligns with theoretical expectations of current conservation in the massless pion limit.

Abstract

A model of diffractive neutrino scattering is formulated in terms of the chiral hadronic current which is conserved in the limit of vanishing pion mass. This current has the correct singularity structure and, naturally, does not lead to contradictions with a partial conservation of the axial current (PCAC). In that respect we differ from earlier work in the literature, where a breakdown of PCAC had been reported. We show that such a breakdown of PCAC is an artifact of the hadronic current non-conservation in the model developed there.