Spark-chamber study of elastic neutrino interactions

Elastic muon production by high-energy neutrinos was studied using the events initiated in the CERN neutrino spark chamber. The contamination with inelastic events was determined assuming the Berman-Veltman cross-section for\({\mathcal{N}}^ * \) production, and taking nuclear interactions of the produced hadrons into account by means of a Monte Carlo method. It is about 45% in the sample selected. The observed distributions of momentum transfers and production angles are best fitted by an axial-vector form factor close to the vector form factors. In the parametrizationF A =(1+q2/M A 2 )−2 the best estimate of the cutoff momentumM A is (0.65 −0.40 +0.45 ) GeV.