Coincidence charged-current neutrino-induced deuteron disintegration

TL;DR

This paper explores how charged-current neutrino interactions with deuterons can be used to accurately determine neutrino energy by detecting specific outgoing particles, employing a relativistic model and various approximation methods.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed theoretical framework for deuteron disintegration by neutrinos, extending a relativistic model to include different interaction approximations and kinematic scenarios.

Findings

Provided cross sections for various kinematic conditions.

Demonstrated the feasibility of isolating specific reaction channels.

Analyzed the impact of final-state interactions on measurements.

Abstract

Deuteron disintegration by charged-current neutrino (CC$\nu$) scattering offers the possibility to determine the energy of the incident neutrino by measuring in coincidence two of the three resulting particles: a charged lepton (usually a muon) and two protons, where we show that this channel can be isolated from all other, for instance, from those with a pion in the final state. We discuss the kinematics of the process for several detection scenarios, both in terms of kinematic variables that are natural from a theoretical point of view and others that are better matched to experimental situations. The deuteron structure is obtained from a relativistic model (involving an approximation to the Bethe-Salpeter equation) as an extension of a previous, well-tested model used in deuteron electrodisintegration. We provide inclusive and coincidence (semi-inclusive) cross sections for a variety of kinematic conditions, using the plane-wave impulse approximation, introducing final-state hadronic exchange terms (plane-wave Born approximation) and final-state hadronic interactions (distorted-wave Born approximation).