Abstract

We study the impact of nuclear effects on the extraction of the weak-mixing angle sin2 ?W from deep inelastic (anti-)neutrino-nucleus scattering, with special emphasis on the recently announced NuTeV Collaboration 3? deviation of sin2 ?W from its standard model value. We have found that nuclear effects, which are very important in electromagnetic deep inelastic scattering (DIS), are quite small in weak charged current DIS. In neutral current DIS processes, which contain the weak mixing angle, we predict that these effects play also an important role and may dramatically affect the value of sin2 ?W extracted from the experimental data. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.