Modeling Atmospheric Neutrino Interactions: Duality Constrained Parameterization of Vector and Axial Nucleon Form Factors

Abstract

We present new parameterizations of vector and axial nucleon form factors. We maintain an excellent descriptions of the form factors at low momentum transfers, where the spatial structure of the nucleon is important, and use the Nachtman scaling variable \xi to relate elastic and inelastic form factors and impose quark-hadron duality constraints at high momentum transfers where the quark structure dominates. We use the new vector form factors to re-extract updated values of the axial form factor from neutrino experiments on deuterium. We obtain an updated world average value from neutrino and pion electroproduction experiments of M_A = 1.0144 +- 0.0136 GeV/c2. Our parameterizations are useful in modeling atmospheric neutrino interactions (e.g. for neutrino oscillations experiments)