We investigate the low nu method (developed by the CCFR/NUTEV collaborations) to determine the neutrino
flux in a wide band neutrino beam at very low energies, a region of interest to neutrino oscillations experiments. Events with low hadronic final state energy nu < Nu_cut (of 1, 2 and 5 GeV) were used by the MINOS collaboration to determine the neutrino flux in their measurements of neutrino and antineutrino total cross sections. The lowest neutrino energy for which the method was used in MINOS is 3.5 GeV, and the lowest antineutirno energy is 6 GeV. At these energies, the cross sections are dominated by inelastic processes. We investigate the application of the method to determine the neutrino flux for energies as low as 0.7 GeV where the cross sections are dominated by quasielastic scattering and Delta(1232) resonance production. We nd that the method can be extended to low energies by using nu cut values of 0.25 and 0.50 GeV, which is feasible in fully active neutrino detectors such as MINERvA.
Authors: A. Bodek, Ulascan Sarica, Donna Naples, Lu Ren
arXiv:1201.3025v1 to be published in EPJC
