ELECTROWEAK THEORY OF NEUTRINO INDUCED PRODUCTION OFF FREE NUCLEON: CASE OF NEUTRAL CURRENT PROCESS

Abstract

This thesis presents a relativistic description of the neutral current (NC) neutrino-induced associated production of strange particles, in the framework of the Glashow-Salam Weinberg (GSW) model. In the Laboratory (Lab) frame, where the target nucleon is at rest, the kinematics and dynamics of the process were derived separately. The differential cross-section (DCS) was expressed in terms of the norm squared of the invariant matrix element (IME), which was manipulated into the contraction between leptonic and hadronic tensors. In turn, these tensors were evaluated by employing the Casimir’s trick and Feynman trace techniques. In addressing the complexity at hadronic vertex, first it was parameterized by eighteen unknown form factors, which were then extracted from the Born term model by employing the SU(3) symmetry and Cabibbo V-A theory. MATLAB R2016a software was implemented to perform numerical analysis of the production process. The numerical results have led to the identification of the dominant reaction channels in the neutrino-induced associated production of

off free proton. The analysis reveals that the -channel is the dominant contributor to the total DCS, followed by the -channel, while the t-channel contribution remains negligible. The total DCS exhibits suppression in the forward scattering region due to destructive interference between these channels. Moreover, increasing the incident neutrino energy leads to an overall increase in the total DCS. Future studies should focus on refining the hadronic vertex parameterization and exploring other NC neutrino-induced strangeness production processes to further advance research in this field.