Nuclear medium effects in neutrino- and antineutrino-nucleus scattering

TL;DR

This paper investigates how nuclear medium effects influence neutrino and antineutrino scattering on nuclei, comparing theoretical models with experimental data and ab initio calculations to understand differences and improve predictions.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of nuclear medium effects, including mean field and RPA correlations, specifically addressing neutrino-antineutrino differences and benchmarking against recent ab initio results.

Findings

Nuclear medium effects significantly alter scattering cross sections.

Results align with T2K and MiniBooNE experimental data.

Comparison with ab initio calculations validates the model.

Abstract

In this paper we study the influence of nuclear medium effects on quasi-elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering processes. We focus on effects provided by the nuclear mean field and random phase correlations and pay special attention to differences between neutrino- and antineutrino-induced reactions. We confront our results with the T2K and MiniBooNE data for both neutrinos and antineutrinos and the neutrino-antineutrino asymmetry. In view of the recently published ab initio results we provide a careful comparison between our cross section predictions and the ab-initio calculations.