Abstract
The excess of electron-like events measured by MiniBooNE challenges our understanding of neutrinos and their interactions. We review the status of this open problem and ongoing efforts to resolve it. After introducing the experiment and its results, we consider the main experimental backgrounds and the related physics of neutrino interactions with matter, such as quasielastic-like scattering and weak pion production on nucleons and nuclei. Special attention is paid to single photon emission in neutral current interactions and, in particular, its coherent channel. The difficulties to reconcile the MiniBooNE anomaly with global oscillation analysis is then highlighted. We finally outline some of the proposed solutions of the puzzle involving unconventional neutrino-interaction mechanisms.
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Notes
The \(W^+ \, p \rightarrow \varDelta ^{++} \rightarrow p \, \pi ^+\) matrix element is proportional to Clebsch–Gordan coefficient \((1/2 \,1/2 \, 1 \,1 | 3/2 \, 3/2)^2 = 1\), while for \(Z^0 \, p \rightarrow \varDelta ^{+} \rightarrow p \, \pi ^0\) one has \((1/2 \,1/2 \, 1 \,0 | 3/2 \, 1/2)^2 = 2/3\).
This band would be narrower and closer to the lower end if the reanalyzed ANL and BNL data of Ref. [27] had been used.
In the \(3+1+1\) scheme, the fifth neutrino is much heavier than 1 eV so that oscillations due to \(\varDelta m^2_{51}\) are averaged [53].
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Acknowledgements
We are indebted to Matheus Hostert and Teppei Katori for their valuable comments about the manuscript. This research has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under contracts FIS2017-84038-C2-1-P and PID2020-112777GBI00, the EU STRONG-2020 project under the program H2020-INFRAIA-2018-1, grant agreement no. 824093 and by Generalitat Valenciana under contract PROMETEO/2020/023.
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Alvarez-Ruso, L., Saul-Sala, E. Neutrino interactions with matter and the MiniBooNE anomaly. Eur. Phys. J. Spec. Top. 230, 4373–4389 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-021-00293-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-021-00293-9