The cross sections for neutrino scattering off the 12C and 16O nuclei are calculated within the framework of the continuum Random Phase Approximation. A model to consider also the final state interactions is developed. Total charge-conserving and charge-exchange cross sections for both electron neutrinos and antineutrinos have been calculated up to projectile energies of 100 MeV. The sensitivity of the cross sections to the residual interaction and to the final state interactions is investigated. A direct comparison between neutrino and electron scattering cross sections calculated under the same kinematic conditions is presented. We found remarkable differences between electromagnetic and weak nuclear responses. The model is applied to describe cross sections of neutrinos produced by muon decay at rest and in supernovae explosions.
We describe a model for pion production off nucleons and coherent pions from nuclei induced by neutrinos in the 1 GeV energy regime. Besides the dominant Delta pole contribution, it takes into account the effect of background terms required by chiral symmetry. Moreover, the model uses a reduced nucleon-to-Delta resonance axial coupling, which leads to coherent pion production cross sections around a factor two smaller than most of the previous theoretical estimates. Nuclear effects like medium corrections on the Delta propagator and final pion distortion are included.
Bremsstrahlung of photons emitted during the scattering of $pi^{+}$-mesons off nuclei is studied for the first time. Role of interactions between $pi^{+}$-mesons and nuclei in the formation of the bremsstrahlung emission is analyzed in details. We discover essential contribution of emitted photons from nuclear part of Johnson-Satchler potential to the full spectrum, in contrast to the optical Woods-Saxon potential. We observe unusual essential influence of the nuclear part of both potentials on the spectrum at high photon energies. This phenomenon opens a new experimental way to study and check non-Coulomb and nuclear interactions between pions and nuclei via measurements of the emitted photons. We provide predictions of the bremsstrahlung spectra for pion scattering off $^{44}{rm Ca}$.
Current long baseline experiments aim at measuring neutrino oscillation parameters with a high precision. A critical quantity is the neutrino energy which can not be measured directly but has to be reconstructed from the observed hadrons. A good knowledge of neutrino-nucleus interactions is thus necessary to minimize the systematic uncertainties in neutrino fluxes, backgrounds and detector responses. In particular final-state interactions inside the target nucleus modify considerably the particle yields through rescattering, charge-exchange and absorption. Nuclear effects can be described with our coupled channel GiBUU transport model where the neutrino first interacts with a bound nucleon producing secondary particles which are then transported out of the nucleus. In this contribution, we give some examples for the application of our model focusing in particular on the MiniBooNE and K2K experiments.
All available theoretical estimates of neutrino-induced coherent pion production rely on the local approximation for the Delta propagator. The validity of this approximation is scrutinized. It is found that the local approximation overestimates the neutrino-induced coherent pion production on nuclei significantly, by up to 100%.
We propose the universal approach to describe spreading widths of monopole, dipole and quadrupole giant resonances in heavy and superheavy spherical nuclei. Our approach is based on the ideas of the random matrix distribution of the coupling between one-phonon and two-phonon states generated in the random phase approximation. We use the Skyrme interaction SLy4 as our model Hamiltonian to create a single-particle spectrum and to analyze excited states of the doubly magic nuclei $^{132}$Sn, $^{208}$Pb and $^{310}$126. Our results demonstrate that the universal approach enables to describe gross structure of the spreading widths of the considered giant resonances.