High-energy nuclear scattering of neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper investigates high-energy neutrino interactions with nucleons and nuclei using QCD dipole models, revealing nuclear suppression effects and the significant role of specific boson components in diffraction.

Contribution

It applies the nonlinear Balitsky-Kovchegov evolution to predict nuclear effects in neutrino scattering at very high energies, highlighting the importance of the $ ext{q}ar{ ext{q}}g$ component.

Findings

Up to 10% nuclear suppression in neutrino-oxygen scattering.

Diffractive contribution is only a few percent of total.

The $ ext{q}ar{ ext{q}}g$ component accounts for about 40% of diffractive cross section.

Abstract

We study the energy dependence of the total and diffractive neutrino-nucleon and neutrino-nucleus cross sections at very high energies. The calculation employs the QCD dipole model and the small-$x$ nonlinear Balitsky-Kovchegov evolution. We show the sensitivity of the nuclear effect quantification on the nuclear setup, and predict up to $\sim 10\%$ nuclear suppression in the inclusive neutrino-oxygen scattering stemming from the nonlinear evolution. Diffractive contribution to the total scattering is small, which is only few percentage. The $\left|q\bar{q}g\right>$ componnent of the $W^{\pm}$ boson is found to contribute significantly to the diffractive process, which reaches up to $\sim 40\%$ of the diffractive cross section.