20 research outputs found
A Measurement of Coherent Neutral Pion Production in Neutrino Neutral Current Interactions in NOMAD
We present a study of exclusive neutral pion production in neutrino-nucleus
Neutral Current interactions using data from the NOMAD experiment at the CERN
SPS. The data correspond to muon-neutrino Charged Current
interactions in the energy range GeV. Neutrino
events with only one visible in the final state are expected to result
from two Neutral Current processes: coherent production, {\boldmath
} and single production in
neutrino-nucleon scattering. The signature of coherent production is an
emergent almost collinear with the incident neutrino while 's
produced in neutrino-nucleon deep inelastic scattering have larger transverse
momenta. In this analysis all relevant backgrounds to the coherent
production signal are measured using data themselves. Having determined the
backgrounds, and using the Rein-Sehgal model for the coherent
production to compute the detection efficiency, we obtain {\boldmath } corrected coherent- events with GeV. We measure {\boldmath }.
This is the most precise measurement of the coherent production to
date.Comment: 23 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Lett.
A Search for Single Photon Events in Neutrino Interactions
We present a search for neutrino-induced events containing a single,
exclusive photon using data from the NOMAD experiment at the CERN SPS where the
average energy of the neutrino flux is GeV. The search is motivated
by an excess of electron-like events in the 200--475 MeV energy region as
reported by the MiniBOONE experiment. In NOMAD, photons are identified via
their conversion to in an active target embedded in a magnetic field.
The background to the single photon signal is dominated by the asymmetric decay
of neutral pions produced either in a coherent neutrino-nucleus interaction, or
in a neutrino-nucleon neutral current deep inelastic scattering, or in an
interaction occurring outside the fiducial volume. All three backgrounds are
determined {\it in situ} using control data samples prior to opening the
`signal-box'. In the signal region, we observe {\bf 155} events with a
predicted background of {\bf 129.2 8.5 3.3}. We interpret this as
null evidence for excess of single photon events, and set a limit. Assuming
that the hypothetical single photon has a momentum distribution similar to that
of a photon from the coherent decay, the measurement yields an upper
limit on single photon events, {\boldmath } per \nm\
charged current event. Narrowing the search to events where the photon is
approximately collinear with the incident neutrino, we observe {\bf 78} events
with a predicted background of {\bf 76.6 4.9 1.9} yielding a more
stringent upper limit, {\boldmath } per \nm\ charged
current event