Confronting electron- and neutrino-nucleus scattering

Abstract

The analysis of the sample of charged current quasi elastic events collected by the MiniBooNE Collaboration suggests that the scheme successfully employed to describe electron-nucleus scattering fails to explain neutrino-nucleus cross sections. I argue that, due to flux average, the double differential neutrino-nucleus cross section does not allow for a clearcut determination of the dominant reaction mechanism. A systematic study of the large body of electron scattering data may help to identify the processes, other than single nucleon knockout, contributing to the observed neutrino cross section.

Comments: Invited paper to NUFACT 11, XIIIth International Workshop on Neutrino Factories, Super Beams and Beta Beams, 1-6 August 2011, CERN and University of Geneva (submitted to IOP conference series)