Characterisation of nuclear effects in muon-neutrino scattering on hydrocarbon with a measurement of final-state kinematics and correlations in charged-current pionless interactions at T2K

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This paper reports measurements of final-state proton multiplicity, muon and proton kinematics, and their correlations in charged-current pionless neutrino interactions, measured by the T2K ND280 near detector in its plastic scintillator (C$_8$H$_8$) target.

• The data were taken between years 2010 and 2013, corresponding to approximately 6$\times10^{20}$ protons on target.
• Thanks to their exploration of the proton kinematics and of kinematic imbalances between the proton and muon kinematics, the results offer a novel probe of the nuclear-medium effects most pertinent to the (sub-)GeV neutrino-nucleus interactions that are used in accelerator-based long-baseline neutrino oscillation measurements.
• These results are compared to many neutrino-nucleus interaction models which all fail to describe at least part of the observed phase space.