Methods to Determine Neutrino Flux at Low Energies:Investigation of the Low $ν$ Method

Abstract

We investigate the "low-$ν$" method (developed by the CCFR/NUTEV collaborations) to determine the neutrino flux in a wide band neutrino beam at very low energies, a region of interest to neutrino oscillations experiments. Events with low hadronic final state energy $ν<ν_{cut}$ (of 1, 2 and 5 GeV) were used by the MINOS collaboration to determine the neutrino flux in their measurements of neutrino ($ν_μ$) and antineutrino ($\nub_μ$) total cross sections. The lowest $ν_μ$ energy for which the method was used in MINOS is 3.5 GeV, and the lowest $\nub_μ$ energy is 6 GeV. At these energies, the cross sections are dominated by inelastic processes. We investigate the application of the method to determine the neutrino flux for $ν_μ$, $\nub_μ$ energies as low as 0.7 GeV where the cross sections are dominated by quasielastic scattering and $Δ$(1232) resonance production. We find that the method can be extended to low energies by using $ν_{cut}$ values of 0.25 and 0.50 GeV, which is feasible in fully active neutrino detectors such as MINERvA.

25 pages, 32 figures, to be published in European Physics Journal C