First double-differential measurement of kinematic imbalance in neutrino interactions with the MicroBooNE detector

Collaboration, MicroBooNE and Blake, Andrew and Devitt, Alesha and Nowak, Jaroslaw and Thorpe, Chris and Patel, Niam and Pophale, Ishanee (2023) First double-differential measurement of kinematic imbalance in neutrino interactions with the MicroBooNE detector. Physical review letters, 131 (10): 101802. ISSN 1079-7114

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Abstract

We report the first measurement of flux-integrated double-differential quasielastic-like neutrino-argon cross sections, which have been made using the Booster Neutrino Beam and the MicroBooNE detector at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The data are presented as a function of kinematic imbalance variables which are sensitive to nuclear ground state distributions and hadronic reinteraction processes. We find that the measured cross sections in different phase-space regions are sensitive to different nuclear effects. Therefore, they enable the impact of specific nuclear effects on the neutrino-nucleus interaction to be isolated more completely than was possible using previous single-differential cross section measurements. Our results provide precision data to help test and improve neutrino-nucleus interaction models. They further support ongoing neutrino-oscillation studies by establishing phase-space regions where precise reaction modeling has already been achieved.