Impact of nuclear effects on the extraction of neutrino oscillation parameters

Phys Rev Lett. 2013 Nov 27;111(22):221802. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.221802. Epub 2013 Nov 26.

Abstract

study the possible impact of nuclear effects and final state interactions on the determination of the oscillation parameters due to the misreconstruction of nonquasielastic events as quasielastic events at low energies. We analyze a ν(μ) disappearance experiment using a water Čerenkov detector. We find that, if completely ignored in the fit, nuclear effects can induce a significant bias in the determination of atmospheric oscillation parameters, particularly for the atmospheric mixing angle. Even after inclusion of a near detector, a bias in the determination of the atmospheric mixing angle comparable to the statistical error remains.