Single photon events from neutral current interactions at MiniBooNE

Understand

The MiniBooNE experiment has reported results from the analysis of $\nu _e$ and $\bar \nu _e$ appearance searches, which show an excess of signal-like events at low reconstructed neutrino energies, with respect to the expected background.

• A significant component of this background comes from photon emission induced by (anti)neutrino neutral current interactions with nucleons and nuclei.
• With an improved microscopic model for these reactions, we predict the number and distributions of photon events at the MiniBooNE detector.
• Our results are compared to the MiniBooNE in situ estimate and to other theoretical approaches.