| Neutrino experiments use heavy nuclei (C, Fe, Pb) to achieve necessary statistics. However, the use of heavy nuclei exposes these experiments to the nuclear dependence of neutrino-nucleus cross sections, which are poorly known and difficult to model.;This dissertation presents an analysis of the nuclear dependence of inclusive charged-current neutrino scattering using events in carbon, iron, lead, and scintillator targets of the MINERvA detector. MINERvA (Main INjector ExpeRiment for nu-A) is a few-GeV neutrino nucleus scattering experiment at Fermilab. Acceptance of the muon spectrometer limits the analysis to 2 GeV < Enu < 20 GeV and 0° < thetamicro < 17° . The total cross section sigma and differential cross section dsdxbj are measured, but the final result is ratios of these cross sections. Taking ratios dramatically reduces systematic uncertainties, most notably from the flux. This is the first precision measurement of nuclear effects using neutrino interactions in the non-perturbative, few-GeV regime.;The modeling of nuclear-dependence is found to be adequate as a function of neutrino energy, but fails to describe the xbj-dependence. The data show an enhancement in the cross section at xbj > 0.7 which grows with the size of the nucleus and a suppression of the cross section at xbj < 0.1 which also grows with the size of the nucleus. Neither the enhancement nor the suppression are predicted by current neutrino interaction simulation codes. |
