Lisa Whitehead, Stony Brook

Title:  Measurement of the Single Charged Pion Production Cross Section in Charged-Current 
Neutrino-Carbon Interactions


Abstract:

The discovery of neutrino oscillations is one of the most exciting recent developments in particle physics. 
Current and future neutrino experiments are aiming to make precise measurements of the oscillation 
parameters. Improving our understanding of neutrino-nucleus cross sections is crucial to these precision 
studies of neutrino oscillations. Interactions in the neutrino energy region around 1 GeV are particulary 
important because this is the region of the expected oscillation signal in many experiments, but the cross 
sections in this region are not very well-known. This energy region is complicated due to overlapping 
contributinos from quasi-elastic scatting, resonant single pion production, and deep ineleastic scattering. 
This dissertation describes a measurement of the cross section for resonant single charged pion production 
in charged-current muon neutrino interactions with a carbon target. The measurement was made using data 
collected by the K2K long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiemnt, which used a muon neutrino beam 
with a mean energy of 1.3 GeV. The results of this measurement are consistent with previous experiments 
and predictions based on a widely-accepted model.