The State of the Art of Neutrino Cross Section Measurements

Abstract

The study of neutrino interactions has recently experienced a renaissance, motivated by the fact that neutrino oscillation experiments depend critically on an accurate models of neutrino interactions. These models have to predict not only the signal and background populations that oscillation experiments see at near and far detectors, but they must also predict how the neutrino's energy which enters a nucleus gets transferred to energies of the particles that leave the nucleus after the neutrino interacts. Over the past year there have been a number of new results on many different neutrino (and antineutrino) interaction channels using several different target nuclei. These results are often not in agreement with predictions extraolated from charged lepton scattering measurements, or even from predictions anchored to neutrino measurements on deuterium. These new measurements are starting to give the community the handles needed to improve the theoretical description of neutrino interactions, which ultimately pave the way for precision oscillation measurements. This report briefly summarizes recent results and points out where those results differ from the predictions based on current models.