Reduced cross sections of electron and neutrino charged current quasielastic scattering on nuclei

TL;DR

This paper analyzes semi-exclusive reduced cross sections for neutrino and electron quasielastic scattering on various nuclei, showing their similarity and providing constraints for nuclear models used in neutrino physics.

Contribution

It introduces a relativistic distorted wave impulse approximation approach to analyze reduced cross sections, offering new constraints for nuclear models in neutrino scattering.

Findings

Reduced cross sections are similar for electron and neutrino scattering.

Cross sections agree with electron scattering data across three nuclei.

The approach can test spectral functions and final state interactions.

Abstract

The semi-exclusive averaged reduced cross sections for (anti)neutrino charged current quasi-elastic scattering on carbon, oxygen, and argon are analyzed within the relativistic distorted wave impulse approximation. We found that these cross sections as functions of missing nucleon energy are similar to those of electron scattering and are in agreement with electron scattering data for three nuclei. The difference between the electron and neutrino cross sections can be attributed to Coulomb distortion on the electron wave function. The averaged reduced cross sections depend slowly upon incoming lepton energy. The approach presented in this paper provide novel constraints on nuclear models of quasi-elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering and can be easily applied to test spectral functions and final state interactions, employed in neutrino event generators.