# Measurement of the neutrino-oxygen neutral-current quasielastic cross section using atmospheric neutrinos at Super-Kamiokande

Wan, L, Abe, K, Bronner, C, Hayato, Y, Ikeda, M, Iyogi, K, Kameda, J, Kato, Y, Kishimoto, Y, Marti, Ll
et al (show 156 more authors) (2019) Measurement of the neutrino-oxygen neutral-current quasielastic cross section using atmospheric neutrinos at Super-Kamiokande. PHYSICAL REVIEW D, 99 (3). 032005-.

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## Abstract

Neutral current (NC) interactions of atmospheric neutrinos on oxygen form one of the major backgrounds in the search for supernova relic neutrinos with water-based Cherenkov detectors. The NC channel is dominated by neutrino quasi-elastic (NCQE) scattering off nucleons inside $^{16}$O nuclei. In this paper we report the first measurement of NCQE cross section using atmospheric neutrinos at Super-Kamiokande (SK). The measurement used 2,778 live days of SK-IV data with a fiducial volume of 22.5 kiloton water. Within the visible energy window of 7.5-29.5 MeV, we observed $117$ events compared to the expected $71.9$ NCQE signal and $53.1$ background events. Weighted by the atmospheric neutrino spectrum from 160 MeV to 10 GeV, the flux averaged NCQE cross section is measured to be $(1.01\pm0.17(\text{stat.})^{+0.78}_{-0.30}(\text{sys.}))\times10^{-38}$ cm$^2$.

Item Type: Article 11 pages, 9 figures, submitted to PRD hep-ex, hep-ex Symplectic Admin 13 Mar 2019 15:55 19 Jan 2023 00:57 10.1103/PhysRevD.99.032005 https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/Phys... https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3034044