Neutrino Deuterium Cross Section Model
Document Type
Oral Presentation
Department
Physics
Abstract
Neutrino oscillation experiments such as DUNE will give particle physicists insight into why our universe is composed primarily of matter. However, these experiments require precise measurement of the neutrino energy, but large uncertainties in our knowledge of neutrino-nucleus interactions make this difficult. We need better measurements of the processes that can occur when neutrinos interact with nuclei.The reason to study this interaction is that DUNE will operate in an energy range in which a significant fraction of neutrino interactions will create pions via the Δ . If DUNE can’t reconstruct these well and has to omit pion events, it will increase the error on their results. My project is modeling a Meson Exchange Current (MEC) as neutrinos interact on deuterium, using the deuterium scattering model in GENIE as a starting point. From this we were able to extract the double differential cross section for this interaction in terms of the kinematic variables Q^2 and W. Future work includes comparing the results of the model to real deuterium scattering data, then modifying the scattering cross section to account for the different momenta that the neutron and proton pair have as a correlated pair inside the nucleus.
Neutrino Deuterium Cross Section Model
Neutrino oscillation experiments such as DUNE will give particle physicists insight into why our universe is composed primarily of matter. However, these experiments require precise measurement of the neutrino energy, but large uncertainties in our knowledge of neutrino-nucleus interactions make this difficult. We need better measurements of the processes that can occur when neutrinos interact with nuclei.The reason to study this interaction is that DUNE will operate in an energy range in which a significant fraction of neutrino interactions will create pions via the Δ . If DUNE can’t reconstruct these well and has to omit pion events, it will increase the error on their results. My project is modeling a Meson Exchange Current (MEC) as neutrinos interact on deuterium, using the deuterium scattering model in GENIE as a starting point. From this we were able to extract the double differential cross section for this interaction in terms of the kinematic variables Q^2 and W. Future work includes comparing the results of the model to real deuterium scattering data, then modifying the scattering cross section to account for the different momenta that the neutron and proton pair have as a correlated pair inside the nucleus.
