Measurement of Muon Neutrino Charged Current Single $\pi^0$ Production on Hydrocarbon using MINERvA

Altinok, Ozgur

doi:10.2172/1352001

Title: Measurement of Muon Neutrino Charged Current Single $$\pi^0$$ Production on Hydrocarbon using MINERvA

Thesis/Dissertation · Sun Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1352001· OSTI ID:1352001

Altinok, Ozgur ^[1]

Tufts Univ., Medford, MA (United States)

A sample of charged-current single pion production events for the semi- exclusive channel ν_µ + CH → µ^-π⁰ + nucleon(s) has been obtained using neutrino exposures of the MINERvA detector. Differential cross sections for muon momentum, muon production angle, pion momentum, pion production angle, and four-momentum transfer square Q² are reported and are compared to a GENIE-based simulation. The cross section versus neutrino energy is also re- ported. The effects of pion final-state interactions on these cross sections are investigated. The effect of baryon resonance suppression at low Q² is examined and an event re-weight used by two previous experiments is shown to improve the data versus simulation agreement. The differential cross sections for Q² for Eν < 4.0 GeV and E_ν ≥ 4.0 GeV are examined and the shapes of these distributions are compared to those from the experiment’s $$\bar{v}$$_µ-CC (π⁰) measurement. The polarization of the pπ⁰ system is measured and compared to the simulation predictions. The hadronic invariant mass W distribution is examined for evidence of resonance content, and a search is reported for evidence of a two-particle two-hole (2p2h) contribution. All of the differential cross-section measurements of this Thesis are compared with published MINERvA measurements for ν_µ-CC (π⁺) and \bar{v}$_µ-CC (π⁰) processes.