QED medium effects in (anti)neutrino-nucleus and electron-nucleus scattering: elastic scattering on nucleons
Abstract
Interpretation of current and future neutrino oscillation and electron scattering experiments requires knowledge of lepton-nucleon and lepton-nucleus interactions at the percent level. We study the exchange of photons between charged particles and the nuclear medium for (anti)neutrino-, electron-, and muon-induced reactions inside a large nucleus. While quantum electrodynamics (QED)-medium contributions are formally suppressed by two powers of the electromagnetic coupling constant when compared to the leading-order cross sections, low-energy modes and the nuclear size enhance the effect by orders of magnitude. They require a proper infrared regularization, which we implement as a screening of the electromagnetic interactions at atomic length scales or above. We provide approximate analytic expressions for the distortion of (anti)neutrino-nucleus and charged lepton-nucleus cross sections and evaluate the QED-medium effects for realistic values of the screening scale on the example of elastic scattering with nucleons inside the nucleus. We find new permille- to percent-level effects, which were not considered in either (anti)neutrino-nucleus or electron-nucleus scattering.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2206.10637,
title = {QED medium effects in (anti)neutrino-nucleus and electron-nucleus scattering: elastic scattering on nucleons},
author = {Oleksandr Tomalak and Ivan Vitev},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.10637},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
18 pages, 10 figures, v2: version published in Physics Letters B, plots for different beam energies added to new Appendix B