Neutrino Cross Sections: Interface of shallow- and deep-inelastic scattering for collider neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper evaluates neutrino and antineutrino cross sections at energies up to a few TeV, focusing on the low-energy inelastic scattering region and comparing different theoretical approaches for collider neutrino experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a parametrization of the electron-proton structure function adapted for neutrino scattering, including axial current corrections, and compares various models for low-energy neutrino cross sections.

Findings

The structure function parametrization aligns with NLO QCD evaluations.

Comparison shows differences among models in the 10-1000 GeV range.

Results inform neutrino cross section predictions for collider experiments.

Abstract

Neutrino experiments in a Forward Physics Facility at the Large Hadron Collider can measure neutrino and antineutrino cross sections for energies up to a few TeV. For neutrino energies below 100 GeV, the inelastic cross section evaluations have contributions from weak structure functions at low momentum transfers and low hadronic final state invariant mass. To evaluate the size of these contributions to the neutrino cross section, we use a parametrization of the electron-proton structure function, adapted for neutrino scattering, augmented with a correction to account for the partial conservation of the axial vector current, and normalized to structure functions evaluated at next-to-leading order in QCD, with target mass corrections and heavy quark corrections. We compare our results with other approaches to account for this kinematic region in neutrino cross section for energies between 10--1000 GeV on isoscalar nucleon and iron targets.