Precise Measurement of Dimuon Production Cross-Sections in muon neutrino Fe and muon antineutrino Fe Deep Inelastic Scattering at the Tevatron
NuTeV Collaboration, M. Goncharov, P. Spentzouris
TL;DR
This paper presents precise measurements of neutrino- and antineutrino-induced dimuon production in iron, using NuTeV sign-selected beams and CCFR data. It employs LO-QCD charm production fits to extract charm mass, strange-quark PDFs, and fragmentation parameters, while producing forward dimuon cross-section tables that minimize model dependence. The cross-section tables are combined across experiments to yield the most precise dimuon cross-sections to date and enable LO-QCD-based tests of charm production dynamics and V_cd, with implications for the strange content of the nucleon. The work provides a practical, model-independent data product for phenomenologists to benchmark charm production and PDF frameworks in high-energy DIS on heavy nuclei.
Abstract
We present measurements of the semi-inclusive cross-sections for muon neutrino and muon antineutrino-nucleon deep inelastic scattering interactions with two oppositely charged muons in the final state. These events dominantly arise from production of a charm quark during the scattering process. The measurement was obtained from the analysis of 5102 muon neutrino-induced and 1458 muon antineutrino-induced events collected with the NuTeV detector exposed to a sign-selected beam at the Fermilab Tevatron. We also extract a cross-section measurement from a re-analysis of 5030 muon neutrino-induced and 1060 muon antineutrino-induced vents collected from the exposure of the same detector to a quad-triplet beam by the CCFR experiment. The results are combined to obtain the most statistically precise measurement of neutrino-induced dimuon production cross-sections to date. These measurements should be of broad use to phenomenologists interested in the dynamics of charm production, the strangeness content of the nucleon, and the CKM matrix element Vcd.
