No Arabic abstract
A potential way to distinguish tau-neutrinos from antineutrinos, below the tau-production threshold, but above the pion production one, is presented. It is based on the different behavior of the neutral current pion production off the nucleon, depending on whether it is induced by neutrinos or antineutrinos. This procedure for distinguishing tau-neutrinos from antineutrinos neither relies on any nuclear model, nor it is affected by any nuclear effect (distortion of the outgoing nucleon waves, etc...). We show that neutrino-antineutrino asymmetries occur both in the totally integrated cross sections and in the pion azimuthal differential distributions. To define the asymmetries for the latter distributions we just rely on Lorentz-invariance. All these asymmetries are independent of the lepton family and can be experimentally measured by using electron or muon neutrinos, due to the lepton family universality of the neutral current neutrino interaction. Nevertheless and to estimate their size, we have also used the chiral model of hep-ph/0701149 at intermediate energies. Results are really significant since the differences between neutrino and antineutrino induced reactions are always large in all physical channels.
It is well known that Majorana neutrinos have a pure axial neutral current interaction while Dirac neutrinos have the standard vector-axial interaction. In spite of this crucial difference, usually Dirac neutrino processes differ from Majorana processes by a term proportional to the neutrino mass, resulting in almost unmeasurable observations of this difference. In the present work we show that once the neutrino polarization evolution is considered, there are clear differences between Dirac and Majorana scattering on electrons. The change of polarization can be achieved in astrophysical environments with strong magnetic fields. Furthermore, we show that in the case of unpolarized neutrino scattering onto polarized electrons, this difference can be relevant even for large values of the neutrino energy.
In this article, we present the charged and neutral current coherent pion production in the neutrino-nucleus interaction in the resonance region using the formalism based on the partially conserved axial current (PCAC) theorem which relates the neutrino-nucleus cross section to the pion-nucleus elastic cross section. The pion nucleus elastic cross section is calculated using the Glauber model approach. We calculate the integrated cross sections for neutrino-carbon, neutrino-iron and neutrino-oxygen scattering. The results of integrated cross-section calculations are compared with the measured data
The MINERvA experiment observes an excess of events containing electromagnetic showers relative to the expectation from Monte Carlo simulations in neutral-current neutrino interactions with mean beam energy of 4.5 GeV on a hydrocarbon target. The excess is characterized and found to be consistent with neutral-current neutral pion production with a broad energy distribution peaking at 7 GeV and a total cross section of 0.26 +- 0.02 (stat) +- 0.08 (sys) x 10^{-39} cm^{2}. The angular distribution, electromagnetic shower energy, and spatial distribution of the energy depositions of the excess are consistent with expectations from neutrino neutral-current diffractive neutral pion production from hydrogen in the hydrocarbon target. These data comprise the first direct experimental observation and constraint for a reaction that poses an important background process in neutrino oscillation experiments searching for muon neutrino to electron neutrino oscillations.
The SciBooNE Collaboration reports a measurement of neutral current coherent neutral pion production on carbon by a muon neutrino beam with average energy 0.8 GeV. The separation of coherent from inclusive neutral pion production has been improved by detecting recoil protons from resonant neutral pion production. We measure the ratio of the neutral current coherent neutral pion production to total charged current cross sections to be (1.16 +/- 0.24) x 10-2. The ratio of charged current coherent pion to neutral current coherent pion production is calculated to be 0.14+0.30 -0.28, using our published charged current coherent pion measurement.
We have applied a microscopic model for single photon emission in neutral current interactions on nucleons and nuclei to determine the number and distributions of such events at the Super-Kamiokande detector, for the flux and beam exposure of the T2K experiment in neutrino mode. These reactions represent an irreducible background in electron-(anti)neutrino appearance measurements aimed at a precise measurement of mixing angle $theta_{13}$ and the $CP$ violating phase. We have obtained a total number of photon events that is twice larger than the one from the NEUT event generator (version 5.1.4.2) used in the analysis of T2K data. Detailed comparisons of energy and angular distributions for the $ u_mu$ and $bar u_mu$ fluxes have also been performed.