Improving the accuracy of neutrino energy reconstruction in charged-current quasielastic scattering off nuclear targets

Abstract: We report the results of a theoretical study of quasielastic electron and neutrino interactions with carbon. Our approach takes into account the effects of final-state interactions between the struck nucleon and the residual nucleus, neglected in the impulse approximation, through a generalization of the spectral function formalism. The calculated electron-scattering cross sections turn out to be in very good agreement with the available data over a broad kinematical region. The impact of nuclear effects on the reconstruction of neutrino energy in charged-current quasielastic processes is also studied, and the results of our approach are compared to the predictions of the relativistic Fermi gas model, routinely employed in most Monte Carlo simulations. Finally, we discuss the limitations of the existing procedure for energy reconstruction and propose a new, improved, one. At energy ~600 MeV, we observe a sizable difference between neutrino and antineutrino scattering, important for the measurements of charge-parity symmetry violation. Our analysis suggests that a reliable determination of neutrino energy can only be obtained from models validated by a systematic comparison to the available electron-scattering data.