Charged current neutrino scattering from nucleons

TL;DR

This paper analyzes charged current neutrino and antineutrino scattering from free nucleons at energies of a few GeV, focusing on various interaction processes relevant for neutrino oscillation experiments.

Contribution

It provides detailed calculations of cross sections for multiple scattering processes, including quasielastic, meson production, and deep inelastic scattering, in the relevant energy range.

Findings

Cross section contributions vary with energy and process type.

The effect of energy cuts on the center of mass energy W is analyzed.

Differential cross sections are presented for all processes.

Abstract

In this work, we study the charged current induced neutrino and antineutrino scattering from the free nucleon target. This study has been performed in the energy range of a few GeV, relevant for the (anti)neutrino oscillation experiments with accelerator and atmospheric neutrinos. For a few GeV neutrino, the contribution to the cross section mainly comes from the quasielastic, the inelastic production of mesons like pion, kaon, eta, and hyperons as well as from the deep inelastic scattering by the weak currents in $\Delta S$=0 and $\Delta S$=1 sectors. The numerical results are presented for the $Q^2$ distribution of the differential cross section for all the aforementioned processes. The effect of the cut on the center of mass energy $W$ has been explicitly discussed.