Neutrino-nucleus reactions in the delta resonance region

Abstract Reliable estimates of neutrino–nucleus reactions in the resonance–excitation region play an important role in many of the on-going and planned neutrino oscillation experiments. We study here neutrino–nucleus reactions in the delta-particle excitation region with the use of neutrino pion-production amplitudes calculated in a formalism in which the resonance contributions and the background amplitudes are treated on the same footing. Our approach leads to the neutrino–nucleus reaction cross sections that are significantly different from those obtained in the conventional approach wherein only the pure resonance amplitudes are taken into account. To assess the reliability of our formalism, we calculate the electron–nucleus scattering cross sections in the same theoretical framework; the calculated cross sections agree reasonably well with the existing data.