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  • Open Access

Measurement of the neutrino-oxygen neutral-current quasielastic cross section using atmospheric neutrinos at Super-Kamiokande

L. Wan et al. (Super-Kamiokande Collaboration)
Phys. Rev. D 99, 032005 – Published 15 February 2019
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  • INTRODUCTION
  • THE SUPER-KAMIOKANDE EXPERIMENT
  • SIMULATION
  • EVENT RECONSTRUCTION AND SELECTION
  • CROSS SECTION EXTRACTION
  • CONCLUSION
  • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    • References

    Abstract

    Neutral current (NC) interactions of atmospheric neutrinos on oxygen form one of the major backgrounds in the search for supernova relic neutrinos with water-based Cherenkov detectors. The NC channel is dominated by neutrino quasielastic (NCQE) scattering off nucleons inside O16 nuclei. In this paper we report the first measurement of NCQE cross section using atmospheric neutrinos at Super-Kamiokande (SK). The measurement used 2,778 live days of SK-IV data with a fiducial volume of 22.5 kiloton water. Within the visible energy window of 7.5–29.5 MeV, we observed 117 events compared to the expected 71.9 NCQE signal and 53.1 background events. Weighted by the atmospheric neutrino spectrum from 160 MeV to 10 GeV, the flux averaged NCQE cross section is measured to be (1.01±0.17(stat.)−0.30+0.78(sys.))×10−38  cm2.

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    • Received 16 January 2019

    DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.99.032005

    Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

    Published by the American Physical Society

    Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

    1. Research Areas
    Lepton induced nuclear reactionsNuclear reactionsNuclear structure & decaysNucleus-neutrino interactions
    1. Physical Systems
    Neutrinos
    1. Properties
    6 ≤ A ≤ 19
    1. Techniques
    Cherenkov detectorsNeutrino detectionParticle interactions
    Nuclear PhysicsParticles & FieldsGravitation, Cosmology & Astrophysics

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    Vol. 99, Iss. 3 — 1 February 2019

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    Images

    • Figure 1
      Figure 1

      NCQE cross section on oxygen per nucleon as a function of neutrino energy. Solid lines show the neutrino cross sections with proton (black) and neutron (red), and dashed lines show antineutrinos cross section with proton (green) and neutron (blue).

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    • Figure 2
      Figure 2

      Cherenkov angle distribution in data (black points) and MC expectation (colored histograms) after all other cuts and with neutron tagging. The green histogram shows the non-NC backgrounds, blue shows the NC non-QE components, and red shows the NCQE components.

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    • Figure 3
      Figure 3

      Neutron tagging time distribution for events with only one neutron tagged. The black points show the data distribution and the blue line shows the fitted exponential distribution. The red histogram indicates the accidental background.

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    • Figure 4
      Figure 4

      Neutron multiplicity in data (black points) and MC (red histogram). The uncertainties assigned to data are statistical while those assigned to MC are the 10% intrinsic neutron-tagging uncertainty.

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    • Figure 5
      Figure 5

      Reduction efficiency as a function of the reconstructed prompt energy. The energy dependence mainly comes from spallation cut (50% to 100%) and the neutron-tagging cut (4% to 22%). The error bars represent the reduction efficiency uncertainty and the neutron tagging uncertainty, as listed in Table. 4.

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    • Figure 6
      Figure 6

      Detection efficiency as a function of the incident neutrino energy. The error bars represent the reduction efficiency uncertainty and the neutron tagging uncertainty.

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    • Figure 7
      Figure 7

      Vertex distributions of the NC sample. The solid rectangle shows the inner detector of SK, and the dotted rectangle shows the fiducial volume region.

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    • Figure 8
      Figure 8

      Energy distribution of the NC data sample (black points) against MC expectations (colored histograms). The red histogram shows NCQE signal, green shows single-pion channels, blue shows multipion channels, black shows non-NC backgrounds, and yellow shows the accidental background without any true neutron. Summing up the green and the blue histogram gives the NC non-QE backgrounds.

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    • Figure 9
      Figure 9

      The gray histogram shows the atmospheric neutrino spectrum predicted by HKKM model, the black curve shows the cross section from Ankowski model, the red line shows the predicted flux-averaged cross section, and the black point shows the measured cross section.

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