Speaker
Katherine Woodruff
(New Mexico State University)
Description
One of the least constrained contributions to the neutral current (NC) elastic
neutrino-proton cross section is the strange axial form factor, which
represents the strange quark spin contribution to the spin structure of the
proton. This becomes the net strange spin contribution, $\Delta s$, in the
limit when the negative four-momentum transfer squared ($Q^2$) is zero. The
strange axial form factor can be determined by studying NC elastic scattering
events in the MicroBooNE detector. MicroBooNE's unique ability to detect
low-energy protons is expected to allow the reconstruction of these events with
a $Q^2$ as low as 0.10 GeV$^2$ and to determine the strange axial form factor in a
model-independent approach. We present a selection of neutral current elastic
events in a subset of MicroBooNE neutrino data, as well as our plan to extract
the strange part of the axial form factor and $\Delta s$ from this selection in
the full data set.
Primary author
Katherine Woodruff
(New Mexico State University)
