Abstract
We measure neutrino charged-current quasielasticlike scattering on hydrocarbon at high statistics using the wideband Neutrinos at the Main Injector beam with neutrino energy peaked at 6 GeV. The double-differential cross section is reported in terms of muon longitudinal () and transverse () momentum. Cross section contours versus lepton momentum components are approximately described by a conventional generator-based simulation, however, discrepancies are observed for transverse momenta above for longitudinal momentum ranges 3–5 and . The single differential cross section versus momentum transfer squared () is measured over a four-decade range of that extends to . The cross section turnover and falloff in the range is not fully reproduced by generator predictions that rely on dipole form factors. Our measurement probes the axial-vector content of the hadronic current and complements the electromagnetic form factor data obtained using electron-nucleon elastic scattering. These results help oscillation experiments because they probe the importance of various correlations and final-state interaction effects within the nucleus, which have different effects on the visible energy in detectors.
- Received 20 December 2019
- Revised 1 February 2020
- Accepted 5 February 2020
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.121801
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