Measurement of neutrino-oxygen neutral-current quasi-elastic cross section using atmospheric neutrinos at Super-Kamiokande

Understand

Neutral current (NC) interactions of atmospheric neutrinos on oxygen form one of the major backgrounds in the search for supernova relic neutrinos with water-based Cherenkov detectors.

• The NC channel is dominated by neutrino quasi-elastic (NCQE) scattering off nucleons inside $^{16}$O nuclei.
• In this paper we report the first measurement of NCQE cross section using atmospheric neutrinos at Super-Kamiokande (SK).
• The measurement used 2,778 live days of SK-IV data with a fiducial volume of 22.5 kiloton water.