Electron-scattering constraints for neutrino-nucleus interactions

The extraction of neutrino mixing parameters from neutrino oscillation experiments relies on the reconstruction of the incident neutrino energy and on knowledge of the neutrino-nucleus interaction cross-section for various nuclei and a wide range of incident neutrino energies. There are a wide variety of electron scattering experiments at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility which exploit the similarities between electrons and neutrinos to improve our knowledge of neutrino-nucleus scattering. These include measurements of quasi-elastic and deep inelastic scattering cross sections as well as measurements of incident lepton energy reconstruction techniques.

This talk will present the results of these electron-scattering experiments and their impact on our knowledge of neutrino-nucleus interactions, including nuclear spectral and structure functions, short range correlations, and duality. It will also present the results of the first tests of lepton-energy reconstruction techniques. These tests found that only a small fraction of electron-scattering events could be reconstructed to the correct incident energy and that this fraction was badly predicted by event generators. Including the electron-scattering results should help neutrino experiments achieve their ambitious precision goals.