Nuclear Effects in Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions and the MINERvA Neutrino Nucleus Scattering Program

Nuclear effects of charged current deep inelastic neutrino-iron scattering have been studied in the frame-work of a chi(2) analysis of parton distribution functions (PDFs)(1). A set of iron PDFs have been extracted which are then used to compute x(Bj)-dependent and Q(2)-dependent nuclear correction factors for iron structure functions which are required in global analyses of free nucleon PDFs. Upon comparing our results with nuclear correction factors from neutrino-nucleus scattering models and correction factors for l(+/-)-iron scattering we find that, except for very high x(Bj), our correction factors differ in both shape and magnitude from the correction factors of the models and charged-lepton scattering. The MINERvA neutrino-nucleus scattering experiment at Fermi lab, will systematically study neutrino nuclear effects off of He, C, Fe and Pb for a more thorough A-dependent study of nuclear PDFs and these correction factors.