The impact of neutrino-nucleus interaction modeling on new physics searches

Understand

Accurate neutrino-nucleus interaction modeling is an essential requirement for the success of the accelerator-based neutrino program.

• As no satisfactory description of cross sections exists, experiments tune neutrino-nucleus interactions to data to mitigate mis-modeling.
• In this work, we study how the interplay between near detector tuning and cross section mis-modeling affects new physics searches.
• We perform a realistic simulation of neutrino events and closely follow NOvA's tuning, the first published of such procedures in a neutrino experiment.