Speaker
Description
The precise understanding of neutrino-nucleus interactions is essential for advancing the neutrino experimental program, particularly in the low-GeV energy regime relevant to current and future accelerator-based neutrino oscillation experiments such as DUNE, T2K, and Hyper-Kamiokande. In this energy regime, the nuclear response involves not only quasielastic scattering from individual nucleons but also significant contributions from inelastic channels such as resonance and pion production.
In this work, we employ chiral perturbation theory (ChiPT) to improve upon existing models of neutrino-nucleus cross sections by incorporating baryonic resonances in a theoretically consistent manner. ChiPT provides a systematic framework for describing low-energy interactions of pions and nucleons, including the production of resonances such as the Delta(1232). To complement Chiral Perturbation Theory (ChiPT), we adopt a phenomenological, data-driven approach to constrain the transition form factors.
The outcomes of this work are twofold. First, our work yields an accurate determination of single-pion and lepton production cross sections across a range of kinematics relevant to accelerator experiments. Second, we have developed a FeynRules implementation that encodes our ChiPT-based model in a format that is streamlined for use in the theory-driven Achilles event generator.
These results are accompanied by a software package that makes our model accessible to the broader neutrino community, facilitating its integration into experimental analyses and enabling more precise assessments of cross-section uncertainties.