Paper detail

Entanglement of Quasielastic Scattering and Pion Production

The extraction of neutrino oscillation parameters requires the determination of the neutrino energy from observations of the hadronic final state. Here we discuss the difficulties connected with this energy reconstruction for the ongoing experiments MiniBooNE and T2K. We point out that a lower limit to the uncertainty in the reconstructed energy from Fermi motion alone amounts to about 15%. The entanglement of very different elementary processes, in this case quasielastic scattering and pion production, in the actual observables leads to considerably larger errors. We discuss the sensitivity of the energy reconstruction to detection techniques and experimental acceptances. We also calculate the misidentification cross section for electron appearance in the T2K experiment due to neutral pion production.