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arXiv · 2206.10637

QED medium effects in (anti)neutrino-nucleus and electron-nucleus scattering: elastic scattering on nucleons

Oleksandr Tomalak·Ivan Vitev
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Abstract

Interpretation of current and future neutrino oscillation and electron scattering experiments requires knowledge of lepton-nucleon and lepton-nucleus interactions at the percent level. We study the exchange of photons between charged particles and the nuclear medium for (anti)neutrino-, electron-, and muon-induced reactions inside a large nucleus. While quantum electrodynamics (QED)-medium contributions are formally suppressed by two powers of the electromagnetic coupling constant $α$ when compared to the leading-order cross sections, low-energy modes and the nuclear size enhance the effect by orders of magnitude. They require a proper infrared regularization, which we implement as a screening of the electromagnetic interactions at atomic length scales or above. We provide approximate analytic expressions for the distortion of (anti)neutrino-nucleus and charged lepton-nucleus cross sections and evaluate the QED-medium effects for realistic values of the screening scale on the example of elastic scattering with nucleons inside the nucleus. We find new permille- to percent-level effects, which were not considered in either (anti)neutrino-nucleus or electron-nucleus scattering.

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Oleksandr Tomalak, Ivan Vitev. 2022-10-18. QED medium effects in (anti)neutrino-nucleus and electron-nucleus scattering: elastic scattering on nucleons. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2022.137492

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