Antineutrino Charged-Current reactions on Hydrocarbon with Low Momentum Transfer

TL;DR

This paper analyzes low momentum transfer anti-neutrino interactions on hydrocarbon, showing that including multinucleon effects and screening improves the model's agreement with experimental data, aiding future model development.

Contribution

It extends previous neutrino interaction models to anti-neutrinos, demonstrating the importance of multinucleon effects in low momentum transfer regimes.

Findings

Model with multinucleon effects fits data well

Screening effect improves low energy transfer description

Results facilitate testing of alternative scattering models

Abstract

We report on multinucleon effects in low momentum transfer ($< 0.8$ GeV/c) anti-neutrino interactions on plastic (CH) scintillator. These data are from the 2010-2011 antineutrino phase of the MINERvA experiment at Fermilab. The hadronic energy spectrum of this inclusive sample is well described when a screening effect at low energy transfer and a two-nucleon knockout process are added to a relativistic Fermi gas model of quasielastic, $\Delta$ resonance, and higher resonance processes. In this analysis, model elements introduced to describe previously published neutrino results have quantitatively similar benefits for this antineutrino sample. We present the results as a double-differential cross section to accelerate investigation of alternate models for antineutrino scattering off nuclei.