Single photon events from neutral current interactions at MiniBooNE

The MiniBooNE experiment has reported results from the analysis of $\nu _e$ and $\bar \nu _e$ appearance searches, which show an excess of signal-like events at low reconstructed neutrino energies, with respect to the expected background. A significant component of this background comes from photon emission induced by (anti)neutrino neutral current interactions with nucleons and nuclei. With an improved microscopic model for these reactions, we predict the number and distributions of photon events at the MiniBooNE detector. Our results are compared to the MiniBooNE in situ estimate and to other theoretical approaches. We find that, according to our model, neutral current photon emission from single-nucleon currents is insufficient to explain the events excess observed by MiniBooNE in both neutrino and antineutrino modes.
Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures; error analysis improved; accepted in PLB