Neutrinos probe the proton’s structure in surprising measurement

Amazing stuff! Not very long ago humans were barely able to detect neutrinos (first detected in 1956)! Prying open the innermost secrets of the universe at nanoscale!

"Following a bold suggestion from a postdoc researcher, an international team has discovered a robust technique for probing the internal structure of the proton by using neutrino scattering. Teijin Cai at the University of Rochester and colleagues working on Fermilab’s MINERvA experiment have showed how information about the proton can be extracted from neutrinos that have been scattered by the detector’s plastic target. ..."

From the abstract:

"Scattering of high energy particles from nucleons probes their structure, as was done in the experiments that established the non-zero size of the proton using electron beams. The use of charged leptons as scattering probes enables measuring the distribution of electric charges, which is encoded in the vector form factors of the nucleon. Scattering weakly interacting neutrinos gives the opportunity to measure both vector and axial vector form factors of the nucleon, providing an additional, complementary probe of their structure. The nucleon transition axial form factor, FA, can be measured from neutrino scattering from free nucleons, νμn → μ−p and ν¯μp→μ+n

, as a function of the negative four-momentum transfer squared (Q2). Up to now, FA(Q2) has been extracted from the bound nucleons in neutrino–deuterium scattering, which requires uncertain nuclear corrections. Here we report the first high-statistics measurement, to our knowledge, of the ν¯μp→μ+n

 cross-section from the hydrogen atom, using the plastic scintillator target of the MINERvA11 experiment, extracting FA from free proton targets and measuring the nucleon axial charge radius, rA, to be 0.73 ± 0.17 fm. The antineutrino–hydrogen scattering presented here can access the axial form factor without the need for nuclear theory corrections, and enables direct comparisons with the increasingly precise lattice quantum chromodynamics computations. Finally, the tools developed for this analysis and the result presented are substantial advancements in our capabilities to understand the nucleon structure in the weak sector, and also help the current and future neutrino oscillation experiments to better constrain neutrino interaction models."

Neutrinos probe the proton’s structure in surprising measurement – Physics World

Measurement of the axial vector form factor from antineutrino–proton scattering (open access)

Extended Data Fig. 1: Illustration of MINERvA detector