Nuclear medium effects in the deep inelastic $\nu_\tau/\bar\nu_\tau-^{40}Ar$ scattering at DUNE energies

TL;DR

This paper investigates nuclear medium effects on tau neutrino and antineutrino deep inelastic scattering off argon nuclei at DUNE energies, incorporating advanced structure functions, meson contributions, and nuclear corrections.

Contribution

It provides a detailed calculation of nuclear effects on DIS cross sections for tau neutrinos on argon, including spectral functions, meson contributions, and shadowing corrections, at NLO accuracy.

Findings

Cross sections are computed with nuclear medium effects included.

Results are compared with phenomenological models like nCTEQnu.

The study enhances understanding of tau neutrino interactions in nuclear media.

Abstract

The nuclear medium effects are studied in the $\nu_\tau/\bar\nu_\tau$ interactions from nuclei in the deep inelastic scattering (DIS) region and applied to the $^{40}Ar$ nucleus to obtain the scattering cross sections in the energy region of the proposed DUNE experiment. The free nucleon structure functions ($F_{iN}(x,Q^2);~(i=1-5)$) have been calculated at the next-to-leading order (NLO) using Martin-Motylinski-Harland Lang-Thorne 2014 as well as The Coordinated Theoretical-Experimental Project on QCD parameterizations for parton distribution functions (PDFs) and including the effect of perturbative and nonperturbative QCD corrections \cite{Ansari:2020xne}. These free nucleon structure functions are then convoluted with the nucleon spectral function in the nucleus to obtain the nuclear structure functions ($F_{iA}(x,Q^2);~(i=1-5)$). The nucleon spectral function takes into account the Fermi motion and the binding energy of the nucleons as well as the nucleon correlations within the nucleus. These nuclear structure functions are then used to calculate the deep inelastic scattering cross sections. Moreover, the contribution of $\pi$ and $\rho$ mesons as well as the corrections due to the shadowing and antishadowing effects in the relevant kinematic region of the Bjorken variable $x$ are also included. The numerical results for the cross sections have been presented and compared with the results obtained in the phenomenological approach using nuclear structure functions from nCTEQnu.