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Inclusive quasielastic neutrino and antineutrino scattering off nuclei within the Standard Model and beyond

E. Hernández ¹, J. Nieves ², and J. E. Sobczyk ^3,4

¹Departamento de Física Fundamental e IUFFyM, Universidad de Salamanca, E-37008 Salamanca, Spain
²Instituto de Física Corpuscular (centro mixto CSIC-UV), Institutos de Investigación de Paterna, Apartado 22085, 46071, Valencia, Spain
³Department of Physics, Chalmers University of Technology, SE-412 96 Göteborg, Sweden
⁴Institut für Kernphysik and PRISMA+Cluster of Excellence, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, 55128 Mainz, Germany

Phys. Rev. D 112, 053006 – Published 22 September, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/ll9y-1v4z

Abstract

We derive fully general expressions for the inclusive (anti-)neutrino-induced nuclear quasielastic production of a strange or charmed baryon $Y$ , considering all dimension-six new-physics operators relevant to the semileptonic $q \to q^{'} ℓ ν_{ℓ}$ transition with both left- and right-handed neutrino fields. We illustrate the formalism by applying it to the $Λ_{c}$ production in neutrino-nucleus scattering. The nuclear response is computed using a state-of-the-art ab initio spectral function, based on realistic nuclear many-body wave functions obtained via the coupled-cluster method and a nuclear Hamiltonian derived from chiral effective field theory. We also highlight the role played by the final state interactions between the produced $Y$ hyperon and the residual nuclear system, which can obscure potential new physics signals in this (anti-)neutrino–nucleus reaction. Our results improve upon previous studies that neglected nuclear corrections and uncertainties—effects we show to be comparable to, or even larger than, those expected from new physics.

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Phys. Rev. D 112, 053006– Published 22 September, 2025

Vol. 112, Iss. 5 — 1 September 2025

Received 23 June 2025
Accepted 25 August 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/ll9y-1v4z

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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Inclusive quasielastic neutrino and antineutrino scattering off nuclei within the Standard Model and beyond

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