Measurement of the muon antineutrino double-differential cross section for quasielastic-like scattering on hydrocarbon at ${E}_{\ensuremath{\nu}}\ensuremath{\sim}3.5\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{GeV}$

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Measurement of the muon antineutrino double-differential cross section for quasielastic-like scattering on hydrocarbon at $E_{ν} \sim 3.5 GeV$

C. E. Patrick et al. (MINERνA Collaboration)

Phys. Rev. D 97, 052002 – Published 8 March 2018

Abstract

We present double-differential measurements of antineutrino charged-current quasielastic scattering in the MINERvA detector. This study improves on a previous single-differential measurement by using updated reconstruction algorithms and interaction models and provides a complete description of observed muon kinematics in the form of a double-differential cross section with respect to muon transverse and longitudinal momentum. We include in our signal definition zero-meson final states arising from multinucleon interactions and from resonant pion production followed by pion absorption in the primary nucleus. We find that model agreement is considerably improved by a model tuned to MINERvA inclusive neutrino scattering data that incorporates nuclear effects such as weak nuclear screening and two-particle, two-hole enhancements.

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Received 3 January 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.97.052002

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP³.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Neutrinos

Particles & Fields

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Vol. 97, Iss. 5 — 1 March 2018

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Figure 1
NuMI flux distributions averaged over the MINERvA fiducial volume for antineutrinos as a function of energy, with and without a neutrino-electron scattering constraint. The top plot shows the constrained (red line) and unconstrained (black line) distributions, which are separate by less than the linewidth. The lower plot shows the ratio of the constrained to unconstrained values. The units are antineutrinos/proton on $target / m^{2}$ .
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Figure 2
Random phase approximation correction projected as a function of generated $Q^{2}$ . The solid black curve indicates the central value from the relativistic calculation. The short dashed blue lines indicate uncertainties from low- $Q^{2}$ processes suggested by the application of the model of Nieves, Amaro, and Valverde to muon capture data, and the long dashed red lines a higher $Q^{2}$ uncertainty estimated from the difference between the relativistic and nonrelativistic calculations.
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Figure 3
Recoil energy for data (points) and simulation (colors, POT normalized to data). In the simulation, signal events include both quasielastic events (purple), $2 p 2 h$ scatters (green) and resonant or DIS events (pink and red) with a QE-like signature. The backgrounds consist of quasielastic and $2 p 2 h$ events with a non-QE-like signature (hatched purple and green) and non-QE events (resonant and DIS) without a QE-like signature (hatched pink and red). All cuts except the recoil cut are applied.
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Figure 4
Simulated QE-like background fraction before the recoil cut, in bins of $Q^{2}$ and recoil energy. The line shows the $Q^{2}$ -dependent recoil energy selection used to optimize efficiency and purity.
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Figure 5
Relationship between $E_{ν}^{Q E}$ and $Q_{Q E}^{2}$ in the quasielastic hypothesis, and muon kinematic variables $p_{T}$ and $p_{∥}$ . The dashed lines show constant values of $E_{ν}^{Q E}$ (blue) and $Q_{Q E}^{2}$ (green) corresponding to our $E_{ν}^{Q E}$ and $Q_{Q E}^{2}$ bin boundaries, which are given in Table 1.
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Figure 6
Reconstructed event counts versus muon transverse momentum, in bins of muon longitudinal momentum. Uncertainties on the data are indicated by error bars; uncertainty on the Monte Carlo is indicated by a pink shaded bar. The data uncertainty is statistical; the Monte Carlo simulation includes all sources of systematic uncertainty, including uncertainties on the GENIE signal model. The estimated background contribution is shown by the hatched area.
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Figure 7
Distributions of signal and background events versus muon transverse and longitudinal momentum, $Q_{Q E}^{2}$ and $E_{ν}^{Q E}$ . Here the MINERvA -tuned GENIE simulation is absolutely normalized to the POT of the data sample, but the background corrections described in this section have not yet been applied. The $Q_{Q E}^{2}$ distribution is shown on a log scale to highlight the high $Q_{Q E}^{2}$ region. In the simulation, signal events include both quasielastic events (purple), $2 p 2 h$ scatters (green) and resonant or DIS events (pink and red) with a QE-like signature. The backgrounds consist of quasielastic and $2 p 2 h$ events with a non-QE-like signature (hatched purple and green) and non-QE events (resonant and DIS) without a QE-like signature (hatched pink and red).
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Figure 8
Area normalized recoil distributions before (above) and after (below) background tuning for the bin corresponding to $0.25 < p_{T} < 0.4 GeV$ . The blue boxes indicate the uncertainty in the simulation (red curve) estimated by TFractionFitter.
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Figure 9
Purity (signal/total) as a function of kinematic variables.
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Figure 10
Migration matrix for the $p_{∥} \otimes p_{T}$ distribution. The $x$ axis corresponds to reconstructed bins, the $y$ to true. The large cells correspond to $p_{T}$ bins while the small cells are the $p_{∥}$ bins within a $p_{T}$ bin. The high $p_{T}$ overflow bin is included.
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Figure 11
Efficiency $\times$ acceptance versus generated $p_{T}$ and $p_{∥}$ , for QE-like events in the simulation. The dashed white line illustrates the 20° limit imposed on reconstructed muon angles.
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Figure 12
Ratio between the neutrino energy reconstructed from true muon kinematics and the true neutrino beam energy in the simulation. True quasielastic events show dispersion due to Fermi motion, while $2 p 2 h$ and resonance events tend to underestimate the true neutrino energy.
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Figure 13
Double-differential QE-like cross section versus muon transverse momentum, in bins of muon longitudinal momentum. Inner error bars show statistical uncertainties; outer error bars show the total (statistical and systematic) uncertainty. The red histogram shows the MINERvA -tuned GENIE 2.8.4 model used to estimate smearing and acceptance. These results are tabulated in Tables 7–9.
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Figure 14
Differential QE-like cross section $d σ (E_{ν}^{Q E}) / d Q_{Q E}^{2}$ , in bins of $E_{ν}^{Q E}$ . Inner error bars show statistical uncertainties; outer error bars show the total (statistical and systematic) uncertainty. The red histogram shows the MINERvA -tuned GENIE model used to estimate smearing and acceptance. These results are tabulated in Tables 12–14.
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Figure 15
Differential QE-like cross section $d σ (E_{ν}^{true}) / d Q_{Q E}^{2}$ , in bins of $E_{ν}^{true}$ . The red histogram shows the MINERvA -tuned GENIE model used to estimate smearing and acceptance. These results are tabulated in Tables 17–19.
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Figure 16
Double-differential QE-like cross section versus muon transverse momentum, in bins of muon longitudinal momentum. Inner error bars show statistical uncertainties; outer error bars show the total (statistical and systematic) uncertainty. The red histogram shows the MINERvA -tuned GENIE 2.8.4 model used to estimate smearing and acceptance which is $CCQE + resonant + 2 p 2 h$ . The green histogram shows events produced as CCQE; the blue curve shows default GENIE which is $CCQE + resonant$ . These results are tabulated in Tables 7–9 and the models are included in Supplemental Material [14].
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Figure 17
Double-differential QE-like cross section versus muon transverse momentum, in bins of muon longitudinal momentum (black circles) compared to MINERvA -tuned GENIE (red curve, includes RPA and MINERvA-tuned $2 p 2 h$ ), GENIE without any modifications except the single nonresonant pion correction discussed in Sec. 4 (blue), GENIE with the RPA weight but no $2 p 2 h$ component (green), GENIE with MINERvA-tuned $2 p 2 h$ but no RPA (violet), and GENIE with RPA and untuned $2 p 2 h$ (orange). Inner error bars show statistical uncertainties; outer error bars show the total (statistical and systematic) uncertainty.
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Figure 18
Single-differential projections of the double-differential QE-like cross-section measurements compared to MINERvA -tuned GENIE (red curve, includes RPA and MINERvA-tuned $2 p 2 h$ ), GENIE without any modifications except the single nonresonant pion correction discussed in Sec. 4 (blue), GENIE with the RPA weight but no $2 p 2 h$ component (green), GENIE with MINERvA-tuned $2 p 2 h$ but no RPA (violet), and GENIE with RPA and untuned $2 p 2 h$ (orange). Inner error bars show statistical uncertainties; outer error bars show the total (statistical and systematic) uncertainty. These results are tabulated in Tables 10, 11, 15, and 16.
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Figure 19
Ratio of the double-differential QE-like cross sections versus muon transverse momentum shown in the previous figure, in bins of muon longitudinal momentum. In all cases, the denominator for the ratio is MINERvA -tuned GENIE (includes RPA and MINERvA -tuned $2 p 2 h$ ); the numerators are our measured cross section (black circles), MINERvA-tuned GENIE (red), GENIE without any modifications (blue), GENIE with the RPA weight but no $2 p 2 h$ component (green), GENIE with MINERvA-tuned $2 p 2 h$ but no RPA (violet), and GENIE with RPA and untuned $2 p 2 h$ (orange). Inner error bars show statistical uncertainties; outer error bars show the total (statistical and systematic) uncertainty.
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Figure 20
Double-differential QE-like cross section versus muon transverse momentum, in bins of muon longitudinal momentum compared to the MINERvA-tuned GENIE (red curve), the NuWro Nieves RFG model with random phase approximation and meson exchange current (MEC) (blue curve) and the NuWro RFG model with RPA and transverse enhancement added (green curve). Inner error bars show statistical uncertainties; outer error bars show the total (statistical and systematic) uncertainty.
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Figure 21
Double-differential QE-like cross section versus muon transverse momentum, in bins of muon longitudinal momentum compared to the MINERvA -tuned GENIE (red curve) and the NuWro RFG model with transverse enhancement ( $RFG + TEM$ , blue curve) and the NuWro LFG model with transverse enhancement ( $LFG + TEM$ , green curve). Inner error bars show statistical uncertainties; outer error bars show the total (statistical and systematic) uncertainty.
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Figure 22
Double-differential QE-like cross section versus muon transverse momentum, in bins of muon longitudinal momentum compared to the MINERvA -tuned GENIE (red curve), NuWro and GENIE RFG implementations (blue and purple) and the NuWro spectral function model (green curve). Inner error bars show statistical uncertainties; outer error bars show the total (statistical and systematic) uncertainty.
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Figure 23
MINERvA true CCQE cross section as a function of $E_{ν}^{Q E}$ compared to data from the MiniBooNE and NOMAD experiments. Error bars show the total (statistical and systematic) uncertainty.
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Figure 24
MINERvA QE-like cross section as a function of $E_{ν}^{Q E}$ compared to data from the MiniBooNE experiment. The MiniBooNE QE-like definition does not exclude events with proton KE $> 120 MeV$ as MINERvA does so the comparison is not exact. Error bars show the total (statistical and systematic) uncertainty.
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Figure 25
Reconstructed energy within 100 mm of the neutrino interaction vertex. The black points show MINERvA data. In the top plot, the stacked histograms show the predictions of various models using default GENIE 2.8.4. In the middle plot, the stacked histograms are for the MINERvA -tuned GENIE 2.8.4, which includes RPA and MINERvA -tuned $2 p 2 h$ . The bottom plot shows the ratio of the data and various models to MINERvA -tuned GENIE. Statistical uncertainties only.
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Figure 26
Summary of fractional uncertainties on the single-differential projections of the double-differential QE-like cross-section measurements in data. The cross sections themselves are shown in Fig. 18.
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Figure 27
Absolute fractional uncertainties on the double-differential QE-like cross section versus muon transverse momentum, in bins of muon longitudinal momentum.
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Figure 28
Absolute fractional uncertainties on the cross section versus $Q^{2}$ , in bins of $E_{ν}^{Q E}$ .
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Figure 29
Correlation matrix for the $6 \times 10 p_{T}$ and $p_{∥}$ bins. As in the migration matrix, the larger blocks are $p_{T}$ bins with the smaller scale bins $p_{∥}$ bins.
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Figure 30
Double-differential flux-integrated true CCQE cross section $d^{2} σ / d p_{T} d p_{∥}$ versus muon transverse momentum, in bins of muon longitudinal momentum. Inner error bars show statistical uncertainties; outer error bars show the total (statistical and systematic) uncertainty. These results are tabulated in Tables 22–24.
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Figure 31
True CCQE cross section $d σ (E_{ν}^{Q E}) / d Q_{Q E}^{2}$ , in bins of $E_{ν}^{Q E}$ . Inner error bars show statistical uncertainties; outer error bars show the total (statistical and systematic) uncertainty. These results are tabulated in Tables 27–29.
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Figure 32
Single-differential projections of the double-differential true CCQE cross-section measurements in data, compared to MINERvA -tuned GENIE (red curve, includes RPA and MINERvA -tuned $2 p 2 h$ ), GENIE without any modifications except the single nonresonant pion correction discussed in Sec. 4 (blue), GENIE with the RPA weight but no $2 p 2 h$ component (green), GENIE with MINERvA-tuned $2 p 2 h$ but no RPA (violet), and GENIE with RPA and untuned $2 p 2 h$ (orange). Inner error bars show statistical uncertainties; outer error bars show the total (statistical and systematic) uncertainty. These results are tabulated in Tables 25, 26, 30 and 31.
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Physical Review D

covering particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology

Measurement of the muon antineutrino double-differential cross section for quasielastic-like scattering on hydrocarbon at $E_{ν} \sim 3.5 GeV$

C. E. Patrick et al. (MINERνA Collaboration)

Phys. Rev. D 97, 052002 – Published 8 March 2018

Abstract

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Authors & Affiliations

Article Text

Supplemental Material

References

Issue

Physical Review D

covering particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology

Measurement of the muon antineutrino double-differential cross section for quasielastic-like scattering on hydrocarbon at Eν∼3.5 GeV

C. E. Patrick et al. (MINERνA Collaboration)

Phys. Rev. D 97, 052002 – Published 8 March 2018

Abstract

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

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Article Text

Supplemental Material

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Measurement of the muon antineutrino double-differential cross section for quasielastic-like scattering on hydrocarbon at $E_{ν} \sim 3.5 GeV$