Studying Neutral Current Elastic Scattering and the Strange Axial Form Factor in MicroBooNE

Abstract

One of the least constrained contributions to the neutral current (NC) elastic neutrino-proton cross section is the strange axial form factor, which represents the strange quark spin contribution to the spin structure of the proton. This becomes the net strange spin contribution, $\Delta s$, in the limit when the negative four-momentum transfer squared ($Q^2$) is zero. The strange axial form factor can be determined by studying NC elastic scattering events in the MicroBooNE detector. MicroBooNE's unique ability to detect low-energy protons is expected to allow the reconstruction of these events with a $Q^2$ as low as 0.10 GeV$^2$ and to determine the strange axial form factor in a model-independent approach. We present a selection of neutral current elastic events in a subset of MicroBooNE neutrino data, as well as our plan to extract the strange part of the axial form factor and $\Delta s$ from this selection in the full data set.