Measurement of Muon Neutrino Quasielastic Scattering on a Hydrocarbon Target Eѵ ~ 3.5 GeV

In this thesis, we present the measurement of the charged-current quasi-elastic νµ interaction on polystyrene scintillator (CH) in the MINERνA detector at neutrino energy between 1.5 GeV and 10.0 GeV (~ 3.5 GeV). The data used was taken between March and July 2010, with a total of 9.42 X 1019 protons-on-target. Interactions were selected by requiring a negative muon and low calorimetric recoil energy separated from the interaction vertex. The analysis was performed on 29,620 charged current quasi-elastic interaction candidates in MINERνA's fine-grained scintillator tracker region. The measurement is reported as a flux-averaged single diferential cross section in Q2 and compared with the prediction of di_erent theoretical models in Monte Carlo simulations. Difference in shape between the measured dơ/dQ2QE and the expectation from a model based on independent nucleons in a relativistic fermi gas is found.