Measurement of K+ production in charged-current νμ interactions

Production of K+ mesons in charged-current νμ interactions on plastic scintillator (CH) is measured using MINERvA exposed to the low-energy NuMI beam at Fermilab. Timing information is used to isolate a sample of 885 charged-current events containing a stopping K+ which decays at rest. The differential cross section in K+ kinetic energy, dσ/dTK, is observed to be relatively flat between 0 and 500 MeV. Its shape is in good agreement with the prediction by the genie neutrino event generator when final-state interactions are included, however the data rate is lower than the prediction by 15%

Measurement of K+ production in charged-current nu(mu) interactions

This work was supported by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory under U.S. Department of Energy Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359 which included the MINERvA construction project. Construction support was also granted by the United States National Science Foundation under Award No. PHY-0619727 and by the University of Rochester. Support for participating scientists was provided by NSF and DOE (USA), by CAPES and CNPq (Brazil), by CoNaCyT (Mexico), by CONICYT (Chile), by CONCYTEC, DGI-PUCP and IDI/IGI-UNI (Peru), and by Latin American Center for Physics (CLAF). We thank the MINOS Collaboration for use of its near detector data. We acknowledge the dedicated work of the Fermilab staff responsible for the operation and maintenance of the NuMI beamline, MINERvA and MINOS detectors and the physical and software environments that support scientific computing at Fermilab.Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico - Fondecy