Nuclear medium effects in the deep inelastic ντ/¯ντ−40Ar scattering at DUNE energies

Abstract

The nuclear medium effects are studied in the ντ/¯ντ interactions from nuclei in the deep inelastic scattering region and applied to the 40Ar nucleus to obtain the scattering cross sections in the energy region of the proposed DUNE experiment. The free nucleon structure functions [FiN(x,Q2); (i=1–5)] have been calculated at the next-to-leading order using Martin–Motylinski–Harland-Lang–Thorne 2014 as well as the Coordinated Theoretical-Experimental Project on QCD parametrizations for parton distribution functions (PDFs) and including the effect of perturbative and nonperturbative QCD corrections [Ansari et al., Phys. Rev. D 102, 113007 (2020)]. These free nucleon structure functions are then convoluted with the nucleon spectral function in the nucleus to obtain the nuclear structure functions [FiA(x,Q2); (i=1–5)]. The nucleon spectral function takes into account the Fermi motion and the binding energy of the nucleons as well as the nucleon correlations within the nucleus. These nuclear structure functions are then used to calculate the deep inelastic scattering cross sections. Moreover, the contribution of π and ρ mesons as well as the corrections due to the shadowing and antishadowing effects in the relevant kinematic region of the Bjorken variable x are also included. The numerical results for the nuclear structure functions and scattering cross sections have been presented and compared with the results obtained in the phenomenological approach using nuclear PDFs from nCTEQ15 and nCTEQnu.