Benchmarking Nucleon Production in Hadron Interactions Relevant for GeV-scale Neutrino Experiments
Abstract
In neutrino scattering experiments, the emitted final state particles are essential for identifying interaction channels and reconstructing neutrino energies. During intranuclear propagation, neutrino-induced hadrons can interact with surrounding nucleons, altering both the number of final state particles and detectable energy depositions. As a result, neutrino experiments rely on hadron-nucleus scattering models to simulate these nuclear effects. This paper explores nucleon production predicted by hadron scattering models for common hadrons in neutrino experiments, specifically nucleons and pions. We investigate these models with simulations from the \textsc{GENIE} neutrino event generator, which includes implementations of \textsc{Geant4} Bertini Cascade and \textsc{INCL++}. For popular target nuclei, we find that the number of emitted nucleons for mesonless hadron interactions can be parameterized by simple Gaussian and exponential decay functions. We present these relationships and provide reweighting tools for addressing the hadron scattering model spread in both visible energy and final state nucleon multiplicities.
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BibTeX
@misc{diurba2026benchmarking,
title = {{Benchmarking Nucleon Production in Hadron Interactions Relevant for GeV-scale Neutrino Experiments}},
author = {Richard Diurba and Steve Dytman and Matthew King and Yinrui Liu},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.22662},
eprint = {2609.22662},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22662},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Benchmarking Nucleon Production in Hadron Interactions Relevant for GeV-scale Neutrino Experiments
AU - Richard Diurba
AU - Steve Dytman
AU - Matthew King
AU - Yinrui Liu
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/23
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.22662
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22662
AB - In neutrino scattering experiments, the emitted final state particles are essential for identifying interaction channels and reconstructing neutrino energies. During intranuclear propagation, neutrino-induced hadrons can interact with surrounding nucleons, altering both the number of final state particles and detectable energy depositions. As a result, neutrino experiments rely on hadron-nucleus scattering models to simulate these nuclear effects. This paper explores nucleon production predicted by hadron scattering models for common hadrons in neutrino experiments, specifically nucleons and pions. We investigate these models with simulations from the \textsc{GENIE} neutrino event generator, which includes implementations of \textsc{Geant4} Bertini Cascade and \textsc{INCL++}. For popular target nuclei, we find that the number of emitted nucleons for mesonless hadron interactions can be parameterized by simple Gaussian and exponential decay functions. We present these relationships and provide reweighting tools for addressing the hadron scattering model spread in both visible energy and final state nucleon multiplicities.
ER -