Neutrino-Nucleus Cross Section Analysis with DUNE-PRISM: Proof-of-Concept

Neutrino-nucleus cross section measurements are a vital ingredient for future neutrino oscillation analyses in DUNE. In this project, we show that DUNE-PRISM data can be exploited to create approximately monochromatic virtual fluxes, which we can use to measure cross sections based on measurements of outgoing lepton kinematics from neutrino-nucleus interactions, provided that we have sufficient PRISM data. We show that by using PRISM data, we could reconstruct differential cross sections and resolve their important features, in a way that would hint at their vulnerabilities and provide a path for improving them, with a precision that is usually reserved for $(e,e')$ scattering data based analyses. We show that we could also use PRISM data to perform statistically significant hypothesis testing to compare our interaction models to data. In addition, we demonstrate that the reconstructed results from our method could be unfolded to true $\frac{d\sigma}{d\omega}$ measurements with reasonable statistical uncertainties.