Discrimination of parametrizations for nuclear effects in neutrino scattering through comparisons of low (~ 700 MeV) and medium (~ 3 GeV) energy cross-section data

J. Grange, C. Juszczak, J. Sobczyk, G. P. Zeller

Published 2013-11-23, updated 2014-04-23Version 2

High-quality charged current quasielastic scattering data have recently been reported for both muon neutrinos and antineutrinos from several accelerator-based neutrino experiments. Measurements from MiniBooNE were the first to indicate that more complex nuclear effects, now thought to be the result of nucleon pair correlations, may contribute to neutrino quasielastic samples at a much higher significance than previously assumed. These findings are now being tested by MINER$\nu$A and other contemporary neutrino experiments. Presented here is a comparison of data from MiniBooNE and MINER$\nu$A to a few example parametrizations of these nuclear effects. It has been demonstrated that such effects may bias future measurements of neutrino oscillation parameters and so this issue continues to press the neutrino community. A comparison of data over a large range of neutrino energies is one approach to exploring the extent to which such nucleon correlations may influence our understanding and subsequent modeling of neutrino quasielastic scattering.