Effect of neutrino electromagnetic properties on the quasielastic neutral-current neutrino-nucleus scattering

TL;DR

This paper investigates how neutrino electromagnetic properties, especially magnetic moments, influence neutrino-$^{12}$C scattering in the quasielastic region, revealing that magnetic dipole effects are significant at low momentum transfer.

Contribution

It provides a relativistic analysis of neutrino electromagnetic form factors' impact on neutral-current scattering, incorporating recent experimental constraints.

Findings

Magnetic dipole form factor significantly affects scattering at low $Q^2$.

Charge radius and electric dipole effects are negligible.

Relativistic mean-field model effectively describes quasielastic scattering.

Abstract

In the quasielastic region, we investigate the effect of neutrino electromagnetic properties constrained from the recent experiments on the electroweak neutral current reaction process of the neutrino-$^{12}$C scattering. For a relativistic description of the nuclear dynamics, we employ the relativistic mean-field model, which has been proven to describe the data nicely in the quasielastic region. In the present work, we analyze the influence beyond the Standard Model by considering the neutrino magnetic and electric dipole form factors and charge radius on the neutrino electroweak interactions within $^{12}$C. To this end, we use the values of the neutrino charge radius and the magnetic moment at the squared four momentum transfer $Q^2=0$ obtained from the recent experiments and calculate the neutrino differential cross section of the neutrino-$^{12}$C scattering. We find that the effect of the charge radius and the electric dipole form factor is very small, but the role of the magnetic dipole form factor is sensitive to $Q^2$ and becomes sizable at small momentum transfer.