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Benchmarking neutrino-nucleus quasielastic scattering model predictions against a missing energy profile obtained using a monoenergetic neutrino beam

J. McKean1,2,*, L. Munteanu3,†, and S. Abe4,‡,§

  • *Contact author: mckean.jake.42u@st.kyoto-u.ac.jp
  • †Contact author: laura.munteanu@cern.ch
  • ‡Contact author: seisho@hep.phys.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp
  • §Present address: Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-0033, Japan.
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Phys. Rev. D 114, 012011 – Published 13 July, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/bt2f-15dr

Abstract

We examine three exclusive nuclear ground state shell models implemented in the NEUT neutrino event generator and benchmark them against the recent JSNS2 measurement of missing energy using a monoenergetic neutrino source. The nature of the measurement allows a detailed investigation of nuclear ground-state modeling using a neutrino source, and gives access to a direct measurement of the neutron spectral function in a C12 nucleus. The NEUT intranuclear cascade and nuclear deexcitation nucdeex are used to simulate inelastic final-state interactions and nuclear deexcitations respectively. We find that the spectral function models perform better than relativistic mean field models in modeling both the ground state and the tail of the missing energy distribution when the NEUT cascade and nuclear excitation channels are turned on. We also find that taking into account the missing energy threshold for single nucleon knockout interactions results in all nuclear models being accepted based on the obtained p-values.

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 012011– Published 13 July, 2026
  • Received 30 January 2026
  • Accepted 11 June 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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