Cross sections of the neutrino-nucleus W-boson production (WBP) and trident production

Here we provide the data files of the cross sections for different neutrino flavors and different nucleus targets. More data files will be uploaded later, including the differential cross sections.
If you need any data not shown here yet, or if you have any other questions, please feel free to contact me:
(Bei Zhou, beizhousuper@gmail.com).

Reference papers are https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.08090 and https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.10720 by Bei Zhou and John F. Beacom.

The first paper developed the theoretical framework and calculated the total cross sections. The second paper calculated differential cross sections, d\sigma/d_E, and studied the phenomenological consequences including neutrino absorptions in the Earth and detections in the TeV-PeV observatories including IceCube.

Updates on July 13, 2023, WBP cross sections:

The calculation of the inelastic component of the WBP cross section now uses the latest (second-generation) photon PDFs of proton and neutron from CT18qed (https://cteq-tea.gitlab.io/project/00pdfs/). In the previous work (https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.08090), we used the (first-generation) CT14qed photon PDFs. The WBP inelastic cross section from CT18qed is 10--30% higher than that from CT14qed.

Also, in the WBP cross section files, we added a third column which has the cross section uncertainty, including the uncertainties of the 1) coherent component, 2) diffractive component, 3) inelastic component, PDF uncertainty, and 4) inelastic component, scale uncertainty.

More details can be found in Fig. 20 and relevant text in https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10497 by Keping Xie, Bei Zhou, and T. J. Hobbs.

Conventions of the file names

Neutrino flavors:
nue or ve: \nu_e
numu or vm: \nu_\mu
nutau or vl: \nu_\tau

Nucleus targets:
H2O: water/ice.
Fe: iron, which combines all the major isotopes (Fe54, Fe56, Fe57, Fe58), which matters for neutrino in-earth absorption.
EarthAvg: Earth's averaged (by number density) chemical composition, which matters for neutrino in-earth absorption.
O16: Oxygen 16.
H1: Hydrogen 1 (adding O16 and two H1's gives the cross section for water/ice target).

Charged leptons:
In the W_boson_production folder:
e: e^- or e^+
mu: \mu^- or \mu^-
tau: \tau^- or \tau^+

In the trident_production folder:
e: e^-
E: e^+
m: \mu^-
M: \mu^+
l: \tau^-
L: \tau^+

Others:
W: W boson
X: the final-state of the nucleus part
tot: means total cross section, which sums up all the three scattering regimes/components (coherent, diffractive, and inelastic regimes; see the references papers above for details).
Therefore, for example, nue_H2O_TO_e_W_X_tot.txt is for the channel \nu_e H_2O -> e^- W^+ X or \bar{\nu}_e H_2O -> e^+ W^- X.
Neutrino- and antineutrino-induced channels have the same cross sections. See the references papers above for details.

Units of the data

First column: neutrino energy [ GeV ]
Second column: cross section [ cm^2 ]
Third column (for WBP only): relative uncertainty of the cross section (the thrid column times the second column gives the absolute cross section uncertainty in cm^2).

Basic usage

If you use python, the files can be read and plotted by the script below

from numpy import *
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

fig = plt.figure(figsize=(7, 7), facecolor='w')
ax = fig.add_axes([0.145, 0.12, 0.82, 0.82 ])
ax.set_xscale('log'); ax.set_yscale('log')

xsec = loadtxt('W_boson_production/nue_H2O_TO_e_W_X_tot.txt').T
ax.plot(xsec[0], xsec[1],'r-',lw=1.5)
ax.fill_between(xsec[0], xsec[1]*(1-xsec[2]), xsec[1]*(1+xsec[2]), facecolor='r', alpha=0.3)

plt.show()