https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-014-3091-0
Regular Article - Experimental Physics
Effective spectral function for quasielastic scattering on nuclei
1
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, 14627-0171, USA
2
Hampton University, Hampton, VA, 23668, USA
* e-mail: bodek@pas.rochester.edu
Received:
6
May
2014
Accepted:
22
September
2014
Published online:
7
October
2014
Spectral functions that are used in neutrino event, generators to model quasielastic (QE) scattering from nuclear targets include Fermi gas, Local Thomas Fermi gas (LTF), Bodek-Ritchie Fermi gas with high momentum tail, and the Benhar-Fantoni two dimensional spectral function. We find that the 
dependence of predictions of these spectral functions for the QE differential cross sections (
) are in disagreement with the prediction of the 
superscaling function which is extracted from fits to quasielastic electron scattering data on nuclear targets. It is known that spectral functions do not fully describe quasielastic scattering because they only model the initial state. Final state interactions distort the shape of the differential cross section at the peak and increase the cross section at the tails of the distribution. We show that the kinematic distributions predicted by the superscaling formalism can be well described with a modified effective spectral function (ESF). By construction, models using ESF in combination with the transverse enhancement contribution correctly predict electron QE scattering data.
© SIF and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2014
