Measurement of inclusive charged current interactions on carbon in a few-GeV neutrino beam

Abstract

We report a measurement of inclusive charged current interactions of muon neutrinos on carbon with an average energy of 0.8 GeV using the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Beam. We compare our measurement with two neutrino interaction simulations: NEUT and NUANCE. The charged current interaction rates (product of flux and cross section) are extracted by fitting the muon kinematics, with a precision of 6%–15% for the energy dependent and 3% for the energy integrated analyses. We also extract charged current inclusive interaction cross sections from the observed rates, with a precision of 10%–30% for the energy dependent and 8% for the energy integrated analyses. This is the first measurement of the charged current inclusive cross section on carbon around 1 GeV. These results can be used to convert previous SciBooNE cross-section ratio measurements to absolute cross-section values.