Abstract

We solve neutrino mysteries by watching them interact with our detectors; most of the time, they do not even shake hands though. But when they do, the neutrino can acquire an electric charge and knock things out of the nucleus as it escapes – leaving a crime scene behind. The traces of the charged lepton and the knock-out are collected by the detector, and it is our job to identify and count the original neutrinos. So far, this has not been an easy task: nuclear effects have obscured much of the evidence of the intruding neutrinos, leaving us complex and seemingly irrelevant information. Not all neutrinos misbehave but, unfortunately, the neutrinos we care about – those which could possibly tell us about the creation of the cosmos – all have this modus operandi. To reconstruct the resulting crime scene, we therefore need a complete understanding of how the nuclear effects work. Both the charged lepton and the knock-out have partial fingerprints from the original neutrino, which lie ambiguously on top of the nuclear effect background. It has been found that these fingerprints can be removed via a novel neutrino CSI technique known as ‘final-state correlations’. In our recent MINE RvA neutrino investigation, this new technique was used and a detailed reconstruction of the nuclear effects was presented. The underlying phenomena – such as the initial state of the nucleus, additional knock-out mechanism, and final-state interactions between the knock-out and the rest of the nucleus – are now separated. In this seminar, the current status and future prospects of nuCSI will be discussed.