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Updated: May 24, 2026

Quantification of Hydrogen Concentrations in Surface and Interface Layers and Bulk Materials through Depth Profiling with Nuclear Reaction Analysis
Published on: March 29, 2016
Analysis of γ-ray production in neutral-current neutrino-oxygen interactions at energies above 200 MeV
Artur M Ankowski1, Omar Benhar, Takaaki Mori
1INFN and Department of Physics, "Sapienza" Università di Roma, I-00185 Roma, Italy. Artur.Ankowski@roma1.infn.it
Abstract:
It has long been recognized that the observation of γ rays originating from nuclear deexcitation can be exploited to identify neutral-current neutrino-nucleus interactions in water-Cherenkov detectors. We report the results of a calculation of the neutrino- and antineutrino-induced γ-ray production cross section for the oxygen target. Our analysis is focused on the kinematical region of neutrino energy larger than ∼200 MeV, in which a single-nucleon knockout is known to be the dominant reaction mechanism. The numerical results have been obtained using for the first time a realistic model of the target spectral function, extensively tested against electron-nucleus scattering data. We find that at a neutrino energy of 600 MeV the fraction of neutral-current interactions leading to emission of γ rays of energy larger than 6 MeV is ∼41%, and that the contribution of the p_{3/2} state is overwhelming.
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