Nuclear Effects on the Extraction of $\sin^2\theta_W$

Abstract

We study the impact of nuclear effects on the extraction of the weak-mixing angle $\sin^2\theta_W$ from deep inelastic (anti-)neutrino-nucleus scattering, with special emphasis on the recently announced NuTeV Collaboration 3$\sigma$ deviation of $\sin^2\theta_W$ from its standard model value. We have found that nuclear effects, which are very important in electromagnetic deep inelastic scattering (DIS), are quite small in weak charged current DIS. In neutral current DIS processes, which contain the weak mixing angle, we predict that these effects play also an important role and may dramatically affect the value of $\sin^2\theta_W$ extracted from the experimental data.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures; one figure added, conclusions change