Neutral-current neutrino-nucleus cross sections for A∼50-65 nuclei

We study neutral-current neutrino-nucleus reaction cross sections for Mn, Fe, Co and Ni isotopes. An earlier study for a few selected nuclei has shown that in the supernova environment the cross sections are increased for low energy neutrinos due to finite-temperature effects. Our work supports this finding for a much larger set of nuclei. Furthermore we extend previous work to higher neutrino energies considering allowed and forbidden multipole contributions to the cross sections. The allowed contributions are derived from large-scale shell model calculations of the Gamow-Teller strength, while the other multipole contributions are calculated within the random phase approximation. We present the cross sections as functions of initial and final neutrino energies and for a range of supernova-relevant temperatures. These cross sections will allow improved estimates of inelastic neutrino reactions on nuclei in supernova simulations.