Measurement of muon neutrino quasielastic scattering on carbon

Low energy (200 < E{sub v} < 2000 MeV) neutrino oscillation experiments, including MiniBooNE, require a model of charged current quasi-elastic (CCQE) neutrino interactions to predict signal samples. Using a high-statistics sample of muon neutrino CCQE events, MiniBooNE finds that a simple Fermi gas model, with appropriate adjustments, accurately characterizes the CCQE events observed in a carbon-based detector. The extracted parameters include an effective axial mass, M{sub A} = 1.23 {+-} 0.20 GeV, used to describe the four-momentum dependence of the axial-vector form factor of the nucleon; and a Pauli-suppression parameter, {kappa} = 1.019 {+-} 0.011.