First measurement of neutron capture multiplicity in neutrino-oxygen neutral-current quasielasticlike interactions using an accelerator neutrino beam
We report the first measurement of neutron capture multiplicity in neutrino-oxygen neutral-current quasielasticlike interactions at the gadolinium-loaded Super-Kamiokande detector using the T2K neutrino beam, which has a peak energy of about 0.6 GeV. A total of 30 neutral-current quasielasticlike event candidates were selected from T2K data corresponding to an exposure of 1.76 × 1020 protons on target. The γ raysignals resulting from neutron captures were identified using a neural network. The flux-averaged mean neutron capture multiplicity was measured to be 1.37 0.33ðstat:Þþ0.17 −0.27 (syst:), which is compatible within 2.3 sigma than predictions obtained using our nominal simulation. We discuss potential sources of systematic uncertainty in the prediction and demonstrate that a significant portion of this discrepancy arises from the modeling of hadron-nucleus interactions in the detector medium.
