Charged kaon production by coherent scattering of neutrinos and antineutrinos on nuclei

Abstract

With the aim of achieving a better and more complete understanding of neutrino interactions with nuclear targets, the coherent production of charged kaons induced by neutrinos and antineutrinos is investigated in the energy range of some of the current neutrino experiments. We follow a microscopic approach which, at the nucleon level, incorporates the most important mechanisms allowed by the chiral-symmetry-breaking pattern of QCD. The distortion of the outgoing K ((K) over bar) is taken into account by solving the Klein-Gordon equation with realistic optical potentials. Angular and momentum distributions, as well as the energy and nuclear dependence of the total cross section, are studied.