Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions and Long-Baseline Experiments

In long-baseline experiments the extraction of neutrino mixing parameters and the CP-violating phase requires an event-by-event reconstruction of the neutrino energy from the final state of a neutrino-nucleus reaction. Since all such experiments use nuclear targets this reconstruction requires detailed knowledge of the neutrino reactions with bound nucleons and of the final state interactions of produced hadrons with the nuclear environment. In this talk I will summarize what we know about interactions of neutrinos with nuclei and will stress the similarity with electron-nucleus interactions as a necessary testing ground for all neutrino generators. I will then point out that widely used generators are often built on outdated nuclear physics. In particular for the all-important final state interactions quantum-kinetic transport theory is nowadays mature enough to be used also for the analysis of neutrino long-baseline experiments. Comparisons of transport-theoretical calculations with recent experiments at T2K and MINERvA and predictions for DUNE will be shown to illustrate this point.