Denys Wilkinson Building, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Keble Road, Oxford OX1 3RH
Dr Anezka Klustova, Imperial College
Abstract
Understanding how neutrinos and antineutrinos interact with nuclei in the few-GeV energy range relevant for accelerator neutrino experiments is essential for precise measurements of neutrino oscillations. Nuclear effects can change which particle emerge from an interaction and with what energies, leading to biases in reconstructed neutrino energies if not modelled correctly.
MINERvA is a high-statistics cross-section experiment designed to study these effects using multiple nuclear targets. I will present MINERvA's first inclusive charged-current antineutrino cross section measurements on carbon, hydrocarbon, iron, and lead, probing all interaction modes, with substantial contributions from the largely unconstrained transition region between resonance production and deep-inelastic scattering. I report both absolute cross sections and their ratios to hydrocarbon, as a function of the outgoing antimuon's transverse momentum, using the full MINERvA antineutrino dataset at a mean energy of ~6 GeV. Typical uncertainties are 5–10% for the absolute cross sections and 2–5% for the ratios.
The results reveal clear discrepancies with current neutrino interaction models, most pronounced at low transverse momentum but extending across the full measured range, indicating missing or mis-modelled nuclear effects, particularly for heavier nuclei. Because the energy and target ranges overlap with those of DUNE and Hyper-Kamiokande, these measurements provide important benchmarks and constraints on neutrino interaction models and nuclear effects for future oscillation analyses.
Pre-print: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.07091 [arxiv.org]