Surprising Results for Nuclear Effects in Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions and the MINERνA Neutrino Nucleus Scattering Program

Nuclear effects of charged current deep inelastic neutrino-iron scattering have been studied in the frame-work of a χ2 analysis of parton distribution functions (PDFs). A set of iron PDFs have been extracted which are then used to compute xB j-dependent and Q2-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 `±-iron scattering we find that, except for very high xB j, our correction factors differ in both shape and magnitude from the correction factors of the models and charged-lepton scattering. The MINERνA neutrino-nucleus scattering experiment at Fermilab, 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.