Measurement of $K^{+}$ production in charged-current $\nu_{\mu}$ interactions

The MINERvA collaboration Marshall, C.M. ; Aliaga, L. ; Altinok, O. ; et al.
Phys.Rev.D 94 (2016) 012002, 2016.
Inspire Record 1446753 DOI 10.17182/hepdata.78539

Production of K^{+} mesons in charged-current \nu_{\mu} interactions on plastic scintillator (CH) is measured using MINERvA exposed to the low-energy NuMI beam at Fermilab. Timing information is used to isolate a sample of 885 charged-current events containing a stopping K^{+} which decays at rest. The differential cross section in K^{+} kinetic energy, d\sigma/dT_{K}, is observed to be relatively flat between 0 and 500 MeV. Its shape is in good agreement with the prediction by the \textsc{genie} neutrino event generator when final-state interactions are included, however the data rate is lower than the prediction by 15\%.

3 data tables match query

The differential cross section with respect to $K^+$ kinetic energy $T_{K}$ is given in units of $10^{-39}$ cm$^{2}$ per nucleon per GeV, as well as the total statistical and systematic uncertainties.

The summed covariance for all systematic uncertainties except for the flux. The largest of these are due to background modelling and $K^+$ interactions in the detector.

The statistical covariance is nonzero due to the unfolding procedure, which introduces small negative correlations in the statistical uncertainty from bin to bin.