Assessing the role of nuclear effects in the interpretation of the MiniBooNE low-energy anomaly

TL;DR

This paper investigates how multinucleon interactions affect neutrino energy reconstruction and the interpretation of MiniBooNE's low-energy excess, leading to modest fit improvements but not resolving existing tensions.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of nuclear effects on neutrino energy reconstruction and their impact on oscillation fit results, highlighting limitations in resolving the appearance-disappearance tension.

Findings

Improved fit of MiniBooNE low-energy excess with multinucleon interactions

Shifted allowed regions towards smaller mixing angles and larger mass-squared differences

Nuclear effects alone do not resolve the global oscillation tension

Abstract

We study the impact of the effect of multinucleon interactions in the reconstruction of the neutrino energy on the fit of the MiniBooNE data in terms of neutrino oscillations. We obtain some improvement of the fit of the MiniBooNE low-energy excess in the framework of two-neutrino oscillations and a shift of the allowed region in the $\sin^2 2\vartheta$--$\Delta{m}^2$ plane towards smaller values of $\sin^2 2\vartheta$ and larger values of $\Delta{m}^2$. However this effect is not enough to solve the problem of the appearance-disappearance tension in the global fit of short-baseline neutrino oscillation data.