Speaker
Description
Neutrino oscillation physics has now entered the precision era. In parallel with needing larger detectors to collect more data with, future experiments further require a significant reduction of systematic uncertainties with respect to what is currently available. In the neutrino oscillation measurements from the T2K experiment the systematic uncertainties related to neutrino interaction cross sections are currently the most dominant. To reduce this uncertainty a much improved understanding of neutrino-nucleus interactions is required. In particular, it is crucial to better understand the nuclear effects which can alter the final state topology and kinematics of neutrino interactions in such a way which can bias neutrino energy reconstruction and therefore bias measurements of neutrino oscillations. The upgraded ND280 near detector of T2K will directly confront our naivety of neutrino interactions using a new detector configuration with full polar angle acceptance and a much lower proton tracking threshold. Furthermore, neutron tagging capabilities in addition to precision timing information will allow the upgraded detector to estimate neutron kinematics from neutrino interactions. Such improvements permit access to a much larger kinematic phase space which correspondingly allows techniques such as the analysis of transverse kinematic imbalances (TKI) to offer remarkable constraints of the pertinent nuclear physics for T2K analyses. In this talk we quantitatively demonstrate ND280’s upgraded sensitivity to key nuclear effects such as removal energy and 2p2h. To this end, we present a fit of a parameterised interaction and flux model to simulated measurements of TKI and neutrino energy from the upgraded ND280.
