Low-energy elastic (anti)neutrino–nucleon scattering in covariant baryon chiral perturbation theory

The low-energy antineutrino- and neutrino–nucleon neutral current elastic scattering is studied within the framework of the relativistic SU(2) baryon chiral perturbation theory up to the order of \({\cal O}({p^{3}})\). We have derived the model-independent hadronic amplitudes and extracted the form factors from them. It is found that differential cross sections dσ/dQ² for the processes of (anti)neutrino–proton scattering are in good agreement with the existing MiniBooNE data in the Q² region [0.13, 0.20] GeV², where nuclear effects are expected to be negligible. For Q² ≤ 0.13 GeV², large deviation is observed, which is mainly owing to the sizeable Pauli blocking effect. Comparisons with the simulation data produced by the NuWro and GENIE Mento Carlo events generators are also discussed. The chiral results obtained in this work can be utilized as inputs in various nuclear models to achieve the goal of precise determination of the strangeness axial vector form factor, in particular when the low-energy MicroBooNE data are available in the near future.