%0 Journal Article
%T Measurement of the neutrino-oxygen neutral-current interaction cross section by observing nuclear deexcitation gamma rays
%A T2K Collaboration (Abe, K. et al
%A Cervera-Villanueva, A.
%A Escudero, L.
%A Gomez-Cadenas, J. J.
%A Izmaylov, A.
%A Monfregola, L.
%A Sorel, M.
%A Stamoulis, P.
%J Physical Review D
%D 2014
%V 90
%N 7
%I Amer Physical Soc
%@ 1550-7998
%G English
%F T2KCollaborationAbe_etal2014
%O WOS:000344033100001
%O exported from refbase (https://references.ific.uv.es/refbase/show.php?record=1993), last updated on Wed, 11 Feb 2015 11:59:24 +0000
%X We report the first measurement of the neutrino-oxygen neutral-current quasielastic (NCQE) cross section gamma It is obtained by observing nuclear deexcitation. rays which follow neutrino-oxygen interactions at the Super-Kamiokande water Cherenkov detector. We use T2K data corresponding to 3.01 x 10(20) protons on target. By selecting only events during the T2K beam window and with well-reconstructed vertices in the fiducial volume, the large background rate from natural radioactivity is dramatically reduced. We observe 43 events in the 4-30 MeV reconstructed energy window, compared with an expectation of 51.0, which includes an estimated 16.2 background events. The background is primarily nonquasielastic neutral-current interactions and has only 1.2 events from natural radioactivity. The flux-averaged NCQE cross section we measure is 1.55 x 10(-38) cm(2) with a 68% confidence interval of (1.22, 2.20) x 10(-38) cm(2) at a median neutrino energy of 630 MeV, compared with the theoretical prediction of 2.01 x 10(-38) cm(2).
%R 10.1103/PhysRevD.90.072012
%U http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.3140
%U https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.90.072012
%P 072012-11pp