Theoretical investigation of neutrino-nucleus interactions and application to experiments / Modeling Electron-Nucleus Scattering in GENIE for Future Neutrino Experiments

Garrett King will be presenting, "Theoretical investigation of neutrino-nucleus interactions and application to experiments."

The measurement of neutrino oscillation parameters is an important part of the physics program in the near future, with new state-of-the-art experiments planned within the next decade. Event generators simulate neutrino-nucleus interaction observables and are a critical component of oscillation analyses. (Anti-)neutrino-12C cross sections simulated with NEUT, the event generator used by the Tokai-to-Kamioka (T2K) experiment, are compared to analytic calculations of the same observable done in the factorization scheme.

Josh Barrow and Steven Gardiner will be presenting, "Modeling Electron-Nucleus Scattering in GENIE for Future Neutrino Experiments."

The sensitivity of future neutrino experiments to oscillation parameters and physics beyond the Standard Model is highly dependent on the reduction of theoretical nuclear modeling systematics within the quasielastic regime. Moving beyond the highly simplified treatments of nuclear physics commonly used in existing neutrino event generators will help future precision measurement efforts to achieve their ambitious goals. While the importance of electron scattering data as a validation tool for models of neutrino-nucleus interactions is becoming more widely appreciated, efforts to make full use of the available data by current generators are still limited. As a contribution to GENIE, a commonly-used neutrino event generator, we have begun the implementation of a new quantum-mechanically derived, inherently two-body, inclusive quasielastic lepton scattering cross section model. Currently, the electron—4He cross section implementation has been validated across the available world quasielastic data and shows excellent agreement. Work is continuing to enable GENIE to simulate full final-state event topologies based on this calculation for study within detector geometries. Because this model includes key nuclear physics effects, e.g., interference between one- and two-body operators, which have been neglected previously in GENIE and comparable generators, the completion of this effort will provide a valuable opportunity to identify areas in which traditional generator treatments of lepton-nucleus interactions may be lacking. Although further theory effort is needed to provide similar calculations for larger target nuclei, our framework under development for GENIE will enable such calculations to be easily added to the generator as they become available. In this talk, we present the status of our generator development work, comparisons of the new GENIE cross section model to data, and prospects for how work of this kind might benefit future precision neutrino oscillation experiments.