1201.3025 (A. Bodek et al.)

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

A. Bodek, U. Sarica, D. Naples, L. Ren

We investigate the "low-$\nu$" 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 $\nu<\nu_{cut}$ (of 1, 2 and 5 GeV)
were used by the MINOS collaboration to determine the neutrino flux in their
measurements of neutrino ($\nu_\mu$) and antineutrino ($\nub_\mu$) total cross
sections. The lowest $\nu_\mu$ energy for which the method was used in MINOS is
3.5 GeV, and the lowest $\nub_\mu$ 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 $\nu_\mu$,
$\nub_\mu$ energies as low as 0.7 GeV where the cross sections are dominated by
quasielastic scattering and $\Delta$(1232) resonance production. We find that
the method can be extended to low energies by using $\nu_{cut}$ values of 0.25
and 0.50 GeV, which is feasible in fully active neutrino detectors such as
MINERvA.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.3025