Charged-current quasielastic neutrino scattering off nuclei with nucleon-nucleon short-range correlations

TL;DR

This paper develops a model for charged-current quasielastic neutrino-nucleus scattering that incorporates nuclear mean-field dynamics and short-range correlations, improving agreement with experimental data and elucidating the scattering mechanism.

Contribution

It introduces a novel CCQE scattering model that explicitly includes short-range correlations and analyzes their impact on cross sections and nuclear dynamics.

Findings

Short-range correlations increase high-energy tail cross sections.

Total cross section depends mainly on neutrino energy.

Model aligns well with experimental measurements.

Abstract

In recent years, many studies on neutrino-nucleus scattering have been carried out to investigate nuclear structures and the interactions between neutrinos and nucleons. This paper develops a charged-current quasielastic (CCQE) neutrino-nucleus scattering model to explore the nuclear mean-field dynamics and short-range correlation effects. In this model, the nuclear structure effect is depicted using the scaling function, while the neutrinonucleon interaction is represented by the elementary weak cross section. Results indicate that the double-differential cross section of scattered muon is influenced by the energy and momentum of nucleon in nuclei, and the total cross section depends primarily on the incident neutrino energy. Furthermore, incorporating short-range correlations yields the flux-integrated differential cross sections at high-T region producing larger values, a longer tail, and achieving better experimental consistency. It eventually elucidates the physical relationship between the neutrinonucleus scattering cross section and the variation in incident neutrino energy. The studies in this paper furnishes insights for the research of nucleon dynamics and provides detailed examinations of the neutrino-nucleus scattering mechanism.