Coincidence charged-current neutrino-induced deuteron disintegration for $^2\mathrm{H}_2{^{16}}\mathrm{O}$

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that charge-changing neutrino reactions on heavy water predominantly involve deuterium, enabling precise measurements of neutrino flux and nucleon structure with minimal background from oxygen in high-energy experiments.

Contribution

The paper introduces a relativistic modeling approach to distinguish deuterium contributions from oxygen in neutrino reactions on heavy water, confirming the feasibility of using heavy water for deuterium-focused neutrino studies.

Findings

Oxygen contribution is suppressed by about an order of magnitude compared to deuterium.

Optimized kinematics effectively isolate deuterium signals in neutrino interactions.

Heavy water can be used to study neutrino flux and nucleon structure with minimal background from oxygen.

Abstract

Semi-inclusive charge-changing neutrino reactions on targets of heavy water are investigated with the goal of determining the relative contributions to the total cross section of deuterium and oxygen in kinematics chosen to emphasize the former. The study is undertaken for conditions where the typical neutrino beam energies are in the few GeV region, and hence relativistic modeling is essential. For this, the previous relativistic approach for the deuteron is employed, together with a spectral function approach for the case of oxygen. Upon optimizing the kinematics of the final-state particles assumed to be detected (typically a muon and a proton) it is shown that the oxygen contribution to the total cross section is suppressed by roughly an order of magnitude compared with the deuterium cross section, thereby confirming that CC$\nu$ studies of heavy water can effectively yield the cross sections for deuterium, with acceptable backgrounds from oxygen. This opens the possibility of using deuterium to determine the incident neutrino flux distribution, to have it serve as a target for which the nuclear structure issues are minimal, and possibly to use deuterium to provide improved knowledge of specific aspects of hadronic structure, such as to explore the momentum transfer dependence of the isovector axial-vector form factor of the nucleon.