https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-012-1973-6
Regular Article - Experimental Physics
Methods to determine neutrino flux at low energies
Investigation of the low ν method
1
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, 14627-0171, USA
2
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 15260, USA
* e-mail: bodek@pas.rochester.edu
Received:
13
January
2012
Revised:
21
March
2012
Published online:
11
April
2012
We investigate the “low-ν” method (developed by the CCFR/NUTEV collaborations) to determine the neutrino flux in a wide band neutrino beam at very low energies, a region of interest to neutrino oscillations experiments. Events with low hadronic final state energy 
(of 1, 2 and 5 GeV) were used by the MINOS collaboration to determine the neutrino flux in their measurements of neutrino (ν
μ
) and antineutrino (
) total cross sections. The lowest ν
μ
energy for which the method was used in MINOS is 3.5 GeV, and the lowest 
energy is 6 GeV. At these energies, the cross sections are dominated by inelastic processes. We investigate the application of the method to determine the neutrino flux for ν
μ
, energies as low as 0.7 GeV where the cross sections are dominated by quasielastic scattering and Δ(1232) resonance production. We find that the method can be extended to low energies by using 
values of 0.25 and 0.50 GeV, which are feasible in fully active neutrino detectors such as MINERvA.
© Springer-Verlag / Società Italiana di Fisica, 2012
