Abstract: The weak kaon production off the nucleon induced by neutrinos is studied at the low and intermediate energies of interest for some ongoing and future neutrino oscillation experiments. This process is also potentially important for the analysis of proton decay experiments. We develop a microscopical model based on the SU(3) chiral Lagrangians. The basic parameters of the model are f pi, the pion decay constant, Cabibbo's angle, the proton and neutron magnetic moments, and the axial vector coupling constants for the baryons octet, D and F, that are obtained from the analysis of the semileptonic decays of neutron and hyperons. The studied mechanisms are the main source of kaon production for neutrino energies up to 1.2 to 1.5 GeV for the various channels and the cross sections are large enough to be amenable to be measured by experiments such as Minerva and T2K.

Abstract: The halo-galaxy lensing correlation function or the average tangential shear profile over sampled halos is a very powerful means of measuring the halo masses, the mass profile, and the halo-mass correlation function of very large separations in the linear regime. We reformulate the halo-galaxy lensing correlation in harmonic space. We find that, counterintuitively, errors in the conventionally used flat-sky approximation remain at a percent level even at very small angles. The errors increase at larger angles and for lensing halos at lower redshifts: the effect is at a few percent level at the baryonic acoustic oscillation scales for lensing halos of z similar to 0.2, and comparable with the effect of primordial non-Gaussianity with f(NL) similar to 10 at large separations. Our results allow one to readily estimate/correct for the full-sky effect on a high-precision measurement of the average shear profile available from upcoming wide-area lensing surveys.

Abstract: We report a measurement of the flux-averaged neutral-current elastic differential cross section for neutrinos scattering on mineral oil (CH2) as a function of four-momentum transferred squared, Q(2). It is obtained by measuring the kinematics of recoiling nucleons with kinetic energy greater than 50 MeV which are readily detected in MiniBooNE. This differential cross-section distribution is fit with fixed nucleon form factors apart from an axial mass M-A that provides a best fit for M-A = 1.39 +/- 0.11 GeV. Using the data from the charged-current neutrino interaction sample, a ratio of neutral-current to charged-current quasielastic cross sections as a function of Q(2) has been measured. Additionally, single protons with kinetic energies above 350 MeV can be distinguished from neutrons and multiple nucleon events. Using this marker, the strange quark contribution to the neutral-current axial vector form factor at Q(2) – 0, Delta s, is found to be Delta s = 0.08 +/- 0.26.